


The Boötes Void

by J_Baillier



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Academic pressures, And Sherlock is being Sherlock, Angst, Astronomy, Developing Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Don't copy to another site, Drugs, First Kiss, Getting drunk at a pub, Hurt/Comfort, John has issues too, John is young and snarky, Lots of radioastronomical nonsense that sounds sexy when Sherlock spouts it out, M/M, Romance, Sexual Tension, Sherlock Holmes and Feelings, Sherlock Is A Bit Not Good, Stargazing, There is only one bed in this shack, Unilock, awkward fumbling, tentative friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-07 04:40:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17953778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J_Baillier/pseuds/J_Baillier
Summary: Research time at the telescopes of Cambridge's Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory is a highly sought-after resource for the university's postgraduate students. On a swelteringly hot summer weekend, there is a bit of a cock-up with the bookings…





	1. Approaching The Event Horizon

**Author's Note:**

> Don't expect this fic's radio astronomy to make any realistic sense. I have always loved astronomy in general, but my expertise is limited to that of a groupie. To actual scientists in this field who might stumble upon this story: my sincerest apologies, and I hope that you'll at least get a good laugh out of this... *grin*

The summer heat is blistering as John cycles the last sweaty mile on the A603 to his weekend destination: Cambridge University's Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. Though grandiose in name it looks like little more than a set of antennas on a field in the middle of the countryside. Having been born and raised in the realm of mottled concrete that is London's outer suburbs, for John the sight of gently swaying fields of wheat on both sides of the road make him feel as though he's on a holiday. Insects buzz in the heat rising off the road, and John can feel the prickle of drops of sweat gathering on his temples. The whole of England is experiencing a late June heatwave, so he's not keen on the idea of spending two days in a small hut without air-conditioning. But, he's in a good mood regardless—this solitary weekend is a privilege, not a chore, and he hopes it might give his thesis the nudge forward it so desperately needs. Being granted use of the world-famous radio telescopes here should finally get some experimental work done on the PhD he has spent eight years agonizing over. If he's lucky, the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager Large Array will prove that he's not chasing his own tail in deep space trying to prove his hypothesis. His is a one-man project, credible enough in methodology to be given a side-room desk in the astronomy department of one of the world's leading universities, but not enough to get his articles accepted in reputable magazines, nor are his presentations and posters taken seriously when he competes for space at conferences. He's not the only one in the world employing this methodology, but sometimes he thinks he might be the most stubborn.

His shoulder gives a twinge and he readjusts his palms on the handlebars. At least on this old bike it's just his shoulder injury that's a nuisance—his limp doesn’t bother him when pedalling. His stint in the army had helped him recover some of the motivation lost in the trenches of academia, but it had ended his squash-playing days. He often feels like the army had also aged him more than it should have. He now feels out of place among most of the student body. It was never easy to watch up-and-coming students much cleverer than him win acclaim and advance in their careers; at least now he has the excuse of having been away for some time. They see his limp and probably wonder what the hell he's still doing here as a grad student. But, as long as he is allowed to follow the research path that interests him, it's all fine. That's what he tells himself. That his time will come. That not all the opportunities have passed him by just yet.

Finally, he reaches the worn, blue sign marking the front gates of the observatory grounds. He unlocks the chain in the fence, walks his bike in and leaves it leaning against a bench. Nobody's going to steal it here— _nobody's ever going to steal such a hunk of junk, period_ —but John does lock the gate after himself.

Standing in the yard, the loneliness of his weekend quest hits with a pang. He has brought food, books, magazines, a few DVDs, but it'll be strange not to talk to anyone for two whole days. On the weekends he usually has his meals at a pub or at the college where there's always someone around he knows. He tries to spend as little time as possible in his dingy little bedsit on Sturton Street, but a lot of the time he doesn't know whose company he could seek. He sits in the libraries a lot in the evenings, reading, since he's not been able to work on his thesis for lack of telescope time. On weekdays, he sees the other members of the department at the Institute of Astronomy's beautiful neoclassical building on Madingley Road. Not that it's been very busy lately on the floor on which he works: being summertime, the hordes of undergraduate students have abandoned Cambridge and plenty of staff are on leave as well.

Maybe that's why John had managed to score this booking. Time with the Mullard telescopes are a sought-after prize for astronomy researchers. Home to some of the largest and most advanced aperture synthesis radio telescopes in the whole world, this is the place to come to if one wants to leave a mark in the history of the field. The Observatory being a part of John's home university helps, but he has still waited nineteen months to get his turn.

The landmark of the site, the One-Mile Telescope, stands a few hundred metres off the main road, jutting out of the landscape like a giant-sized table lamp. Further down a path, where the legendary-named Tit Brook flows, sits the saucer-shaped, massive, stitched panorama of the Cosmic Anisotropy Telescope. John won't be needing either, but he'll definitely use some of his break time to take a walk down the dirty path to have a look at them. What he needs for his project are some of the smaller but more precise arrays, and he's taken three courses to learn how to adjust their settings and positions. Boring in the extreme, but now he hopes desperately that the lessons have sunk in.

Halfway across what almost looks like a yard, his leg starts to bother him again, so he stops to chug down half the water from the old soda bottle he had filled at home before making his way to the front door of the only habitable building on site. There have been talks of building larger accommodations, maybe even a museum or a visitor centre but for now, only a small building, known among staff and students as _the_ _bunker_ , offers shelter for the scientists working here. John has seen plenty of photos from the inside at staff parties and PhD presentations; this place has given birth to countless stories of excitement and discovery, of rivalry, drama, and romance. No astronomy education at Cambridge would be complete without the rite of spending at least one weekend in this isolated place.

John digs out the key from his pocket and slides it in—only to find the door already unlocked. Some careless colleague must have accidentally left it open at the end of their booked timeslot. John shrugs and steps in, expecting darkness in the windowless hut.

Instead, the lights are on, the computers already whirring, and the lights on the telescope setup station glow eagerly as it awaits commands. And, there's someone sitting in front of one of the three desks, pounding away at a very fancy-looking laptop.

At the sound of the door closing after John, the man turns to face who he probably thinks is an intruder. He looks familiar to John—in his surprise, je can't come up with a name but he's certain he already knows it. The man is younger than John but then again, most graduate and undergraduate students are. But, that's where the similarities to other students end. Instead of shorts and a T-shirt, the man is wearing a midnight blue suit so beautifully tailored that it looks painted on. He's got a head of lush, dark, bouncy curls obviously lovingly coiffed into looking pretentiously carefree, and John now notices that he has surrounded himself with not one but three laptops, the keyboard of the old table computer John had been planning on using shoved aside to make room for them.

It's hard to decipher the look the man gives John—perhaps because it seems to be constantly changing from surprised to inquisitive, suspicious to dismissive.

"Um, hi," John says because someone has to break the silence. "There's no hurry, just take your time packing your stuff. I know I'm early." He hadn't known how long it would take him to cycle here, so he'd left well before his time slot was to start at six in the evening. No wonder the person awarded the preceding timeslot is still here.

The man's eyes rake down John's torso and he doesn't look impressed at what he sees. "You're not supposed to be here. Check your calendar and vacate the space," he commands.

"I _am_ supposed to be here. I booked this weekend." John drops his backpack down on the floor and digs out his calendar. From between its pages he produces his written timeslot confirmation. "Look, Friday to Sunday, 27th to 29th June. The year matches, too." He limps over and shows the man this piece of paper. His occupational therapist at Queen Alexandra's Military Hospital in Millbank had recommended a cane, an idea which John had aggressively dismissed. _Not touching a fucking cane at my age, don't be daft_.

"Not possible", the man announces. His caramel baritone would be lovely to listen to if he wasn't using it in such a cold, superior manner. He digs out a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket, too, and scrutinises it carefully. "Yours is clearly a forgery. You're not fooling me. I personally went to see Professor's Glendale's secretary about this weekend, and he assured me that my booking was secure."

"Why would I—or anyone—forge a booking sheet? It's not as though I wouldn't get caught when I showed up."

The man is looking at him as though that's exactly what has happened. "You're in the exoplanets group," he announces. "I wasn't even aware that any projects therein involve radio astronomy."

"Well, it does, _now_ ," John replies, crossing his arms. Damn if he's going to let anyone chase him out of here. He's waited for this. He has _earned_ this.

The younger man closes the lid of his laptop, ascends from his chair like a cobra uncoiling, and goes to use the landline on a side table. He gives John a most disapproving side-eye as he waits for the call to connect. "This is Sherlock Holmes; put me through to Professor Glendale, please. Yes, I'm aware of the time, but not everyone goes home early on a Friday afternoon… What? Then connect me to his home number, please….Of _course_ it's an emergency! Why the hell would I be calling him at such a time otherwise?! What do you mean, 'genuine emergency', of course it's a–––"

Whoever is at the other end must have finally managed to interrupt him.

" _Scientific_ emergency!" Sherlock specifies and gives John an eye roll. "The utter gall of these people––" he begins complaining, palm covering the receiver.

While tuning out the rant, John can finally connect the man's name to what he knows, and to his prior sightings of him at department functions and around Cambridge. Usually known just by his surname, Sherlock Holmes is the hottest of shots in Cambridge astronomy, anticipated to put together his own research group as soon as he's done with the formality of his PhD. ' _Formality for him, that is_ ', one of John's team mates had once complained; _'the rest of us have to struggle to get funding while he gets showered with awards. Glendale practically eats out of his hand when not having to apologise to random people Holmes has insulted_ '. 

They wait for the call to connect in a tense silence. The ensuing conversation between Holmes and Glendale is short, and from Holmes' _yes_ ses and _no_ s it is hard to interpret the outcome.

Finally, he puts down the receiver, looking baffled. "He told us to sort the issue out between ourselves." He makes it sound as though the esteemed Professor Glendale had told him to split the atom with a spoon.

"Oh. Okay, then," John says. He has no idea how to do such a thing. Well, he might stand a chance with the average fellow student, but judging by Holmes' reputation, he's not going to compromise. _Well, that makes two of us_.

"I'm sure they can accommodate your booking on some other night. Sorry that you had to come all the way out here for nothing," Holmes says, crossing his arms. His tone betrays the fact that he doesn't _really_ give a toss about any extra hassle this may have caused John.

"Hold on. You think I'm just going to…go? I've waited for over two years for this," John argues.

"Obviously the decisions on who gets timeslots should be based not on queuing time but importance. Your project has languished for years; a few extra months will not make any difference. I have three papers I need to write, a PhD to actually finish––"

"Can't we share? We both need to kip at some point; surely we can divide the time and the gear."

"Share? My measurements are highly time-sensitive; I can't have you messing with the array settings."

"Look, um––"

"Sherlock Holmes," Holmes reminds him as though he's demented enough to have already forgotten.

" _Sherlock_. We're both here, we both need to work. Which arrays do you need?"

"The Optical Aperture system and the CAT."

"Well, that sorts it, because what I need are the Ryle and the AMI."

"The control unit is shared between all of those," Sherlock points out.

"And we hardly need to be doing our setups simultaneously. I see you've got plenty enough laptops, so if I can have the table-top PC we can make this work." _Or can we?_ John bites his lip, looking at the rest of the small shack. "There _is_ the problem of only one bed."

Sherlock waves his worries off with a patrician flick of wrist. "I don't sleep when I work."

"You did reserve the whole weekend, didn't you?"

"Of course."

"You can't stay awake for like fifty hours straight."

"Watch me."

"You can't stay awake for like fifty hours straight and stay _sane_. People can't do that."

Sherlock looks affronted. "I'm not _'people'._ " He makes it sound like a disease.

"Well, we can always take turns with naps in the afternoon and at night, put a bit of a shared dinner together." John offers a smile. "Could be fun."

"I'm not here for _'fun_ '." That's another plague in Holmes' books, apparently.

John raises his hands in resignation. "Okay. Got it. No fun and no co-operation. You can do your setup first, if you insist."

"Of course I insist—on you removing yourself from the premises. You clearly don't even value this opportunity enough to approach it with the required seriousness. If your priorities were based on the furtherment of science, you would have already stopped taking up my time."

"No."

"What do you mean, _'no_ '?"

"It means we're both grad students, so you're not the boss of me." John pushes his backpack next to the wall and throws himself onto the single bed, the old wooden frame groaning from impact. "Go on, do your setup."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be careful what you joke about… the story of this, well story began with a late-night conversation with elldotsee about her spacebois. At some point, I wondered why no one had ever written an astronomy AU that takes place on Earth (who knows, maybe someone already had and I just read it but anyway). As it often happens, such innocent quips lead into ideas, and ideas into stories.
> 
> And no, no chapter title will carry the word Uranus. We're too civilised for that, right? Right? Right…?


	2. Gravity Anomalies

Three hours later, the monitors are whirring, and data is flowing in. There will be less interference from human-made sources of radio waves at night, which produces more accurate readings; it's good to test everything out while it's still evening. The two men have been working in silence, both focused on making sure they won't end up wasting their much-anticipated access to the arrays by missing some trivial issue with a telescope setting.

John is wearing what he's worn all day: a plain white T-shirt and olive-green cotton shorts, and he is still sweating. The summer heat is relentless even though the sun now droops low on the horizon. He steals a glance at his determined companion: Sherlock is leaning back in his chair, stretching his neck. He has finally shed his jacket—John has wondered who the hell would even wear one in this heat—and is now in his shirtsleeves.

Sherlock kicks off his shoes, then frowns at the floor. "Disgusting," he mutters, flounces out of his chair and goes to what John has assumed is a utility closet. "Ha!" Sherlock declares and emerges with a mop and a bucket. Soon, the floor is now clean of the sand, gravel, dust and muck which had made scratchy sounds under John's steps earlier.

"Shoes off," Sherlock commands him. "I'm not doing this again," he warns.

"I'm wondering why you did it the first time," John replies but does toe off his shoes.

A strange, jittery relief flits on Sherlock's expression. He wastes no time on pulling off his now soggy socks and throwing them next to his fancy suitcase in the corner next to the bed. His bespoke trousers look even stranger combined with bare toes, which he begins wiggling and flexing after making a graceful landing back in his chair.

A minute later, his head snaps up, presumably to verify the suspicion that John is still watching him. "What? He asks angrily. "I always work barefoot. Can't abide distractions."

"Distractions such as clothes?" John asks, baffled. He decides he wouldn't mind if Sherlock took off more garments; the man is rather easy on the eye. Skinny, yes. Pale, definitely. But… John wouldn't use the word _pretty_ , but there is definite beauty in his delicate yet sharp features, his indecently lush curls and the cupid's bow that was clearly put on this Earth to pout.  
  


-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

For the next few hours, John gets ignored—save for a few requests to pass a star catalogue from a bookshelf or to vacate the array command console. That's why he is startled when Sherlock suddenly clears his throat.

His eyes are fixed on John. "You were in the army; saw combat," he announces, then shifts his eyes to the papers on his lap. John can tell he's scrutinising a printout from the CAT—an array he has been trying to adjust to his liking for the past hour. Its operating system, notorious among astronomy students, is a nightmarish mix of 1980s retro and patches written by an infamous Cambridge IT guy who later had a nervous breakdown and moved to the Outer Hebrides to herd sheep.

"How'd you know?" John asks, not expecting a very interesting answer. Everyone in the Cambridge astro rumour circle probably knows he spent two years away—well, everyone he interacts with on any sort of regular basis. Sherlock Holmes is certainly not one of them. Sherlock Holmes wouldn't be interested in giving him the time of day if they weren't stuck in a shack together.

"The signs were your limp and your stance after you came in and were surprised by my presence. _Obvious._ "

"Yeah, well, it was never that obvious for me that I'd join until I actually did."

"Why did you?"

Sherlock's inquiry might feel invasive if it felt in any way judgemental. Instead, while John does feel a bit put on the spot, he's mostly just flattered by such unflinching interest and the fact that Sherlock had been making… _deductions_ about him. This must be genuine curiosity since his fellow student clearly isn't fond of small talk. The other grad students in John's department don't quite know how to address his time in the army, so they don't. Nobody seems to understand why he did it, and they're not keen on asking why.

Except for Sherlock.

"I guess I wanted to see if there was more to learn in the world than just the stuff in astrophysics books," John offers.

"Well, what did you learn?"

"That I don't want to be in the army, especially not with a bum leg"

"They would have let you stay?"

"I didn't stick around long enough to ask. Medical discharge."

"Is it…appropriate to ask what happened?" Sherlock now sounds hesitant, and he hasn't hesitated before to be rude or make assumptions about John. His question doesn't sound like garden-variety politeness but a genuine inquiry whether he is doing this right.

"It's fine," John assures him. "It was a training exercise; our driver veered off the road during transport. He died; I was on the front seat, too. The guys in the back got off with bumps and bruises. What I got was two torn tendons, a bit of nerve damage which seems to be resolving, and a nicked artery." He decides not to tell this berk that the injury was in his shoulder, not his leg. That would open up too many other questions—ones about which he doesn't like thinking.

 _My shoulder's fine_.

"Serious, then?" Sherlock's tone is neutral.

"Yeah, kind of."

"I see."

John isn't sure what Sherlock thinks it is he sees, but he's not keen to discuss this further. "So, I came back to Cambridge. Never saw combat."

"The injury does not affect your ability to do research, then?"

"Not really—why would it? I take some stuff for the pain, but no."

" _'Stuff_ '?" A pair of grey-green-blue-whatever eyes are suddenly keenly fixed on John. This time, the attention makes him feel uneasy, but he doesn't know why.

John purses his lips. "Paracetamol, ibuprofen, that sort of thing."

"Oh." Sherlock seems to have lost interest again.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

Since it's the most beautiful summer evening, John decides to leave the oppressive atmosphere of the bunker to watch the sun go down over the arrays. Sherlock sends him on his merry way with stern warnings not to meddle with or break anything.

John chuckles. "Now that you've said that, I'm going to change my plans to moonbathing right on the CAT."

He doesn't get very far before mosquitoes start snacking on his feet. He remembers childhood summer nights spent twisting around in sweaty sheets, scratching relentlessly itchy shins, so he turns back before getting to the pulsar array. After pulling open the door of the control shack, his feet skid to a halt in the middle of the room as he takes in the sight of Sherlock, feet on a desk, nonchalantly leafing through one of the magazines John had stashed at the bottom of his backpack.

"Oi! Who said you could rifle through my stuff?"

Sherlock raises half a brow, then continues his perusal of Hustler. His eyebrows continue their athletics when he turns yet another page, bringing the magazine closer to his eyes. "Anatomically unlikely but the image doesn't look manipulated."

John snatches the offending publication out of his hands and also recovers the years-old copy of Mayfair waiting its turn on the desk next to Sherlock's laptop.

"So this is what you were planning instead of using this place for what it's actually for," Sherlock comments dryly, glancing at the numbers updating themselves on one of his screens.

"Well, I was going to be here all alone, all weekend. Since some of us live like normal people, I've got books and food and some videos, too."

"Undoubtedly as titillating as that drivel I just perused."

"Well, thank God you're above all that!" John snaps and shoves the magazines back into his backpack. Relief washes over when he establishes that the one at the very bottom—featuring no women at all—seems to have been left untouched. "At least I wasn't planning on bringing anyone here. It happens, you know. This place is quite legendary for breakups and hook-ups."

"I'm aware of its many pet names." Sherlock smooths a crease on his trousers.

John is, too. _The Loveshack_ is the most common one. Judging by some of the urban legends in the department, it's almost considered a rite of passage to have a wild night at Mullard with a fellow student.

He experiences a modicum of schadenfreude to spot two damp sweat rings on Sherlock's armpits. It's proof that Sherlock Holmes is a living breathing human being, probably with functional bits like anybody else. He'd caught a whiff of the man's aftershave earlier; he's no expert, but it wasn't any of the cheap brands John has endured nosefuls of at student parties.

"So, I assume you are not currently seeing anyone since those magazines tell me you were not planning to bring a conquest here during the weekend?" Sherlock asks, not sounding like he's actually very interested in an answer.

"No, I'm not seeing anyone." John crosses his arms. "You? Any particular girl warming your bed at night?" He doubts it but is tired of being the one whose life gets poked into by someone looking at him down their nose.

Sherlock gives him a disbelieving glance. "Women… Not my area," he says pointedly.

John is not surprised. "Yeah, um, sure," he manages, then scrambles to say something more sensible. "I think I've seen you with that one bloke, the one who chairs the Astronomical Society," John suddenly realises. "What's his name? Moran…yeah."

"He studies _cosmology,_ " Sherlock explains, loading the word with as much disdain as he can, "And he's merely an acquaintance. One who enjoys the company of women as much as you obviously do."

There was something bitter in the way Sherlock had said that. "Ah," John teases in a knowing tone. "Unrequited love is hard, isn't it?"

For lack of a less dramatic word, Sherlock bristles at him, and John curses at how good that looks on him.

" _Have_ you ever seen anyone?" John asks. He's having fun, now, since apparently talking about other people is the easiest way to get Sherlock Holmes a bit awkward.

"I see plenty of people on an average day," Sherlock replies, and John really can't tell if he's acting deliberately obtuse or oddly literal.

"I mean, has there ever been anyone, or are you like, asexual or something?"

"You mistake failure to be tolerated by others with sexual orientation. I’m not _anything_ , John; why do you want to box me in like that?" Sherlock spins half a circle in his chair so that his back is turned to the rest of the room.

John sits down on the bed, rubs his now aching shoulder. "You don't need, like, human contact?"

"My brother enforces enough human contact on me, thank you."

"What about friends, instead of just acquaintances? Or, even proper companionship and all that."

"Having to endure the irritating habits of someone else, exchanging saliva and germs? Again, pass."

"Emotions? Anything going on there?" John tries, starting to feel like a broken record.

"I need some air," Sherlock hisses, grabs his socks and shoes, hastily puts them on, then slams the door in his wake.

John drops down to lie on the surprisingly comfortable bed and demonstratively digs out his magazines. He's not really in the mood, but maybe the visuals could provide a bit of relaxation.

He gets halfway through Attitude, the one he had been convinced—and relieved—Sherlock hadn't seen. But, his triumph turns into something else, when he notices that the pages of a military-themed photo shoot have been meticulously cut out and stolen.


	3. Parallax

John throws another crisp into the air and artfully manages to catch it into his mouth. The crunching partly conceals what Sherlock tries to say to him.

"Hm?" John asks, folding the mouth of the crisp bag backwards so that he can get to the bottom more easily.

Sherlock looks put-upon for having to repeat himself. "What is it, precisely––" he phrases between clenched teeth, "––that you're working on? I thought you were in the exoplanets group. Didn't think radio astronomy was the usual approach to finding them."

"There are some promising results by the French in searching for drops of flux in intrinsic planetary emissions when a sizable planet is eclipsed by a star. Can't let the French have all the fun, can we?"

There's a dismissive flick of a delicate, pale wrist. "I've of course read that 2011 Lecavelier study. Seemed like nothing but a novelty run. Transit observations require strong signal detection and high levels of precision from the instruments used, and the latter cannot easily be achieved with radio telescopes."

"The SETI project targeted Kepler stars for specific narrow band emissions in order to find systems with multiple planets."

"Getting greedy, are we? One potentially habitable stellar body not enough for you? For instance, Jupiter is one of the strongest sources of radio interference in our planetary system, but it is almost certain that its signature could not be detected at the distance of any known exoplanets."

"I'm not trying to trace signals traveling to Earth. I'm trying to trace signals traveling _between_ exoplanets."

Sherlock's brows hitch up. "That would require the exoplanets to be in conjunction in relation to where we are."

John shrugs. "Yeah. There are plenty of known exoplanets, now, and at any given point there must be several in a suitable position so that I can try to trace them."

"I admire your optimism but not your premise."

"Thanks, I guess?" John says sheepishly. "The radio telescopes at VLA, Green Bank and Atacama have all been used to observe young stars and their protoplanetary discs. Green Bank even _found_ what's now designated as Kepler 221b. Would be nice to be the first to use a British telescope to find something worthwhile."

"Like I said, if notable achievements are what you are after, your approach is wrong."

John scoffs. "What are _you_ doing, then, if it's so much more bloody brilliant?"

"I study quasar absorption spectra in order to trace the historical reionisation patterns of the universe. Those should tell us not only how and when the first galaxies formed, but also what they looked like. Think of it as a sort of supercharged carbon dating for the building blocks of the universe. I have developed a theoretical model for detecting fluctuations in neutral hydrogen density during the early reionisation era, and that's what I am now testing in practice. It should play a key role in the pursuit of 21-centimetre fluctuations from red shifts measured from cosmic gas clouds where stars are born. The error margin of the model naturally depends on how well interferences in the signal can be removed, which is why it's vital that I get enough measurements done at night. If they only gave me enough telescope time! I have done the simulations, published and presented all the data—it's a viable model on paper. But, instead of that being recognised, I am put to the back of the queue with other undergrad students, including _perpetual_ students chasing after aliens! All I need is a solid series of measurements against the cosmic microwave background to prove that the 12-centimetre emissions arising from hyperfine transition in the Lya emissions from high-redshift QSOs––"

"Alright, alright!" John protests. "Slow down for fuck's sake, before you pass out. You don't have to justify it to me; _I'm_ not the one with a habit of questioning the value of other people's work."

"But, don't you _see_? My telescope time is essential to show how to correct ionospheric distortions, so I can calibrate the time and frequency variables of telescope response, while subtracting the bright foreground distortions that get coupled with the instrument response!"

John has no idea what response the man expects to this outburst, but clearly he has failed to provide it: Sherlock crosses his arms, slumps against the back of his chair, and looks sulky.

John decides to extend an olive branch. "So, what you're trying to do is get closer to the moment after the Big Bang when the lights came on, to set the timeline for when stars first formed?"

"You understood all that just now?"

"Like you just pointed out, I've been around for a long time. You're not the only one who knows how to read a research paper."  

"Half of the other people in my research group can't tell a quasar from their backsides." Sherlock seems surprised that he can no longer lump John together with those people. "Why has it taken you so long to get this far with your project?"

Before John can answer, Sherlock leans forward in his chair. "You must have spent at least a year out of the military before returning to Cambridge. You have no scars on your lower legs, even though an injury is supposed to have benched you. What took you so long, getting back to Cambridge?"

John suddenly feels very self-conscious. He is sure as hell not going to explain about the PTSD. He's doing pretty well, now. The nightmares are giving up their hold, and he hasn't had a flashback in months.

"Why would you ever join the military?" Sherlock interrogates.

John can't tell if it's Her Majesty's Armed Forces or him that's being insulted by the tone. "Maybe I got tired of playing second fiddle to brainiacs like you. I'll never win any prizes, never got picked for conferences. Sitting in the back room, trying to scrape a project together while my supervisors were much more interested in their star proteges didn't exactly inspire me to plan a life at Cambridge's astronomy department. My project is what I want to study instead of joining some supposedly sexier project to get more credit."

He joined the military, because he never felt like he belonged in academia. But, having already slotted himself into that life, he couldn't imagine any other sort of civilian existence, either. Abandoning even a stagnating career at Cambridge would have been the shame of the whole family, since he is the first in generations to attend uni. So, he had to look elsewhere. Something… honourable. Something nobody would question.

"Many of history's greatest scientists were overlooked, even persecuted in their time," Sherlock says mysteriously.

John gives him a look. "Yeah, and I'll never be one of those. But maybe you can say hi in your Nobel speech."

"What if––" Sherlock starts, then snaps his mouth shut. He looks exasperated, nervous and cranky, even more so than before. That crankiness now has a proactive tint that's a little bit manic, and it's making John nervous.

"What if what?"

"Sometimes the genius of a person is the way they collaborate. The way they inspire others."

"Don't want to be anybody's assistant, thanks."

"I see I've said the wrong thing."

"No, it's–– I know you're trying to be encouraging—for God knows what reason. Or maybe you like to think you're throwing a crumb down to us mere mortals. I don't need that. I'll just… I'll do my PhD and we'll see, then. Maybe there's some backwater university that'll have me as a teacher."

"Do you… want to teach?"

"Not particularly."

Sherlock rubs his arms vigorously, which strikes John as odd. Then, Sherlock sticks his hands in his pockets, rises from his chair and without a word, goes outside for a moment. When he returns, John half expects him to reek of cigarettes but he doesn't, and those designer pants would hardly accommodate a packet and a lighter without the shape being noticeable.

Sherlock looks calmer, now, even manages half a smile. "So, you like the research," he leaps back into their dialogue. "The thrill of the chase, the excitement of discovery, the chance to follow the developments in humanity's understanding of its existence as your livelihood. You missed it, didn't you, when you were chasing your tail at some barracks with a bunch of teens just out of Sixth form?"

"You don't know anything about me." John turns his back to him and focuses on his work.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

Sherlock doesn't take up the subject of a sleeping rota, so come midnight, John shrugs and takes possession of the bed for a kip. Before settling in, he double-checks that the widget he had programmed to keep scanning a pattern of varying frequencies on one of the telescopes is working perfectly. He hadn't brought pyjamas since they would have been too hot for the weather, and both university and the military had acclimatised him to sharing living quarters with other men, so he unceremoniously strips down to his pants and slips into bed, using only the top sheet to cover himself.

Sherlock spares barely a glance at what he's doing. He seems to be focusing hard, leaning close to one of his screens and squinting at it, his nose scrunching up in an almost comical way that makes him look as though he's just caught a whiff of something unpleasant.

"You don't snore, do you?" he finally asks without peeling his eyeballs off the screen.

John turns to face the wall. "I've not had any complaints."

"That's not what I asked. People are _polite_ ," Sherlock explains superfluously. He makes politeness sound like something contagious.

"Far be it from you to be anything that terrible," John mutters.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

Thanks to the three cans of soda he had consumed in the course of the evening, John's bladder wakes him up with twinge at around two in the morning. It takes a moment for him to reorient himself to the dimly lit room before he remembers where he is and why. During that short period of alarmed confusion, he doesn't register Sherlock's presence.

But, he does a moment later, and Sherlock seems oblivious to him being awake. John is just about to stick out a foot from underneath the sheet and plant it on the floor, when it occurs to him to wonder why Sherlock is leaning so close to a bit of table not adorned with a laptop. He watches Sherlock sniff loudly, then quickly straighten his back with a sharp inhale. In the light of just the computers, John can barely make out that he's blinking hard, now, sitting sideways to John in the swivelling chair.

_Umm.…what?_

Sherlock is suddenly startled, and John realises he may have said the words out loud, not just thought them. They are now left staring at each other, John mostly sleep-fuddled and Sherlock doing a good impression of a deer in headlights.

"Allergies." Sherlock stumbles over the word like a drunken man, and shifts his chair to cover the bit of the side table he'd leaned over.

John rather thinks the statement is bullshit. He's not a doctor, but what sort of allergy medication requires snorting, and why would taking it be embarrassing?

"That's why you don't sleep, huh?" John asks, yawning as he gathers his limbs into a sitting position on the bed. This isn't the first time he's seeing someone in academia taking illicit stuff to put in an all-nighter, but he thought it was just a pre-exam thing for swots. He's never done it, and mostly people seem to rely on caffeine, or something bought off the legit-but-dodgy ADHD students.

John suspects this is something else than Adderall, though. And, Sherlock's sudden short pops outside are also starting to make sense.

John makes one more deduction. "That's why you went through my stuff, then, you _thief_. I mentioned the painkillers. Anything goes, then?"

Sherlock has regained his composure and schooled his features into an annoyingly superior glare. "I function differently than most. Using helps me focus. And no, I have no interest in _painkillers_. They slow me down."

"You pegged me as a stim sort of guy, then?" John can't decide if he should be flattered or insulted. "I don't do any of that shit. If that's the price for aNobel, then no thanks."

Sherlock shrugs—a jerky movement of his shoulders rather than a calculated gesture. "I use solely to get my work done."

John rises to his feet and pads to the side table. There's still two lines, there, next to a credit card. Not that Sherlock's hard drug habit is any of his business, but wouldn't it be a responsible thing to do to a fellow scientist to intervene? He doubts Sherlock would respond to moralising lectures. _Time for a bit of a bluff._ "So, you won't mind if I have some of your brain powder, then. Thanks, Sherlock, that's a great idea. Maybe it'll improve my PhD into something not even you would laugh at."

He tries to shimmy between Sherlock and the table, but the man rolls his chair in to intercept him, looking scandalised. "No, you shouldn't, it's–––"

John feigns ignorance. "It's what? Safe and good for you but not for me?"

"It's _mine_."

John nods theatrically and opens his eyes sarcastically wide as though being startled to back off. "Right, yes, okay. So, we've got a little problem going on, then? If you were using for the betterment of science, you would share."

"Technically, we're rivals."

"Less than five hours ago, you thought I was a joke, not a rival."

Sherlock opens his mouth, then snaps it shut.

John leans on the table, crosses his arms. _Not my business_. _Or is it?_ Does John _like_ sticking his nose into Sherlock's business, and why? _It's in the middle of the night_ , he reminds himself. _Don't analyse things too carefully._ "Out of curiosity, what else?"

"What else what?"

"You understood me, stop pretending you didn't."

Sherlock studies the floor. "Dexedrine. Atomoxitine if I can get it."

"Ato––– what's that?"

"Strattera."

"Oh." An ADHD drug like Dexedrine. "You have ADHD, then?"

Sherlock looks at him as though he's the greatest dolt in the known cosmos.

"I guess that's a no, then. You don't think taking that stuff could be kind of risky, then, if you don't really need it?"

"I know what I'm doing. It's rather simple neurochemistry."

"Your funeral."

"Abstinence is not immortality, and controlled use is––"

"––probably a myth invented by users."

Sherlock huffs. "According to the Home Office Crime Survey, eight hundred and seventy-five thousand people in the UK last year reported using cocaine at least once during the year."

"I don't know any of them."

"You'd be surprised."

"Where do you even get that stuff from?" John has been offered pot and the occasional Ecstasy and benzos at parties, but never cocaine. He knows it's supposed to be expensive; a party drug for City high flyers.

"You think it's a good move, revealing my source?"

"Is it that Moran bloke? He sells you drugs _and_ strings you along? What a nice fucking friend."

"We don't have sex."

John's turn to blink. "I didn't––– _what_?"

"You just implied that he's that sort of a friend."

"No, I didn't." He studies Sherlock's expression for signs that he's taking the piss. He isn't. If anything, he looks vaguely apprehensive and anxious over the turn the conversation is taking. He had been rather blasé, cocky even, about the drugs only a minute ago, but talk of friends—or lack thereof—seems to be a much sorer spot. Sherlock clearly takes things worryingly literally. And, he's a bit of an arsehole but something tells John he doesn't do it very deliberately. He isn't the first science student John has met who has trouble with people. And communication. And eye contact. And sarcasm.

"I have to keep my consumption stable to avoid withdrawal," Sherlock explains. "Perhaps it's practical that you know; it was troublesome trying to work out when you wouldn't notice. I can't afford withdrawal this weekend. I'd be irritable, dysphoric, unsociable––"

"How's that different from your baseline?"

"––prone to sleeping, appetite increased––"

"Those would probably be _good_ things, you know."

"You don't let me finish sentences and I detest it."

"Well, I detest the fact that you think science requires stimulants. You ever had any help with that?"

Holier-than-thou disbelief. "I don't need _help_."

"Maybe you need a better brand of friends, then, people who don't enable you."

"I don't have ' _friends_ '. Like I said, Moran is merely a useful acquaintance." Sherlock stands up, runs a finger along the edge of the table nervously. "Why would you want to find intelligent life somewhere else in the universe? I find the cerebral level of life down here disappointing enough."

"Is that it, then, why you don't do _'friends_ '?" John asks, mocking his snide tone when pronouncing the word. Sherlock's disdain of the concept stinks to high heaven of overcompensation, and it makes John wonder which came first: being an arsehole or not having any friends. "Everyone's an idiot, then? Well, except for me, like you insinuated earlier." He grins, which makes Sherlock look amusingly put-off. He shouldn't be grinning, not really, but it's two fucking a.m. and even if he's just found out a fellow student does Class A drugs, it's not John's job to drag him to NA, is it?

"Idiot is as idiot _does_. What good is intellect if it's being wasted on sex, nonsensical so-called research, being prospective cannon fodder or wasting precious telescope time on masturbatory material?"

Suddenly, John feels like that one particular magazine is burning a hole on the floor, a hole into which he will eventually fall down.

 _Maybe offence is the best defence._ "Is dating beneath you as well, then? Everyone's an idiot so nobody's worth the trouble, then? No friends, so why would you bother with anything more intense?"

John expects his verbal sparring partner to parry his strike, but suddenly Sherlock seems to downright deflate. His long fingers slip into his trouser pocket and produce a small plastic bag, to which he gathers the remaining cocaine with a credit card.

He tosses the bag at John's head as he marches out the door. "Do with it what you will. Maybe it could give you an education in not clutching your pearls about things you don't understand," he spits out before slamming the door.

John places the small bag on the bedside cabinet, feeling rather deflated himself. He hadn't planned that conversation, nor had he executed it well. No clear goal in mind, he'd managed to put Sherlock on the spot, ridicule him, call attention to what is likely a serious addiction for which he must need help. _Nice one, Watson_.

He realises Sherlock had been upset enough to walk out the door without his shoes. John grabs them and opens the door—and Sherlock walks right into him trying to get back in. Their foreheads knock together, and John is forced to grab Sherlock's wrist to keep him from swaying sideways.

Sherlock shakes off his grip, then he snatches the shoes from John's other hand, pivots on his heel and disappears into the warm night.

John shakes his head and goes back to bed.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

Come morning, everything has gone back to business as usual. Sherlock, sporting in a crisp white dress shirt and dark shadows under his eyes, is hunched over the control console, readjusting one of the telescopes. When John plants his feet on the floor next to the bed, there is a curt 'good morning' that signals no dismay or distress at all. It would be a nice surprise, if John didn't instantly wonder if he's just had a fix.

He wonders where Sherlock had gone last night and what he'd been thinking. _Probably that his accidental shackmate is a right arse._

"Morning," John replies. A good night's sleep has improved his mood, too, and he's feeling downright charitable. "Look, about last night––"

Sherlock quickly swings around in his chair. "Don't. As far as I'm concerned, no words of significance were exchanged. Let's be civil, get through this, then go our separate ways once the weekend's done."

"I just wanted to say I'm sorry," John points out, feeling underdressed in just his pants.

"I have been told I bring these things upon myself. We both have had our weekend plans ruined by the other's presence. I should have put together the evidence yesterday that you came prepared for a pleasant, solitary experience." Sherlock's eyes flit to John's backpack and then quickly back to his laptop.

 _Is the git talking about the magazines?_ "I don't mind the company. In general, it was actually a nice surprise," John says and means it.

"I can hear the 'but' at the end of that sentence. Yes, instead of someone you could be _chummy_ with, you were saddled with me. So, let us spare both our blushes and ignore each other. We should get the most work done that way."

Feeling awkward around someone in the same room is hardly the best way for John to work, and pretending that they never had an argument is not going to fix things. "I really am. Sorry."

"I have no use for that," Sherlock replies offhandedly, and returns to his work.


	4. Unified Field Theory

To John's surprise, Sherlock's dismissal of interaction for the rest of the weekend seems to actually clear the air. But it doesn't diminish his curiosity about the man. Now, it's a downright forbidden fruit to try to learn more about him, to get him to share a bit.

He declines an offer to share John's breakfast wares, consisting of breadrolls, butter and jam. After getting disappointed at how dry the bread has gone, John ends up devouring the small bag of crisps he'd brought.

"Is your PhD such an infinity project because you're so preoccupied with your baser instincts?" Sherlock asks him when John has munched halfway through the bag.

"I thought we were going to be civil," John mutters, mouth half-full of mushed-up crisps.

"It's a genuine inquiry."

"We can't all be like you, living off coke and vapours of superiority."

A hand suddenly slips into the bag on the desk between them and digs out a single crisp. "I don't like these. I prefer the plain ones." Sherlock still eats it, slowly and thoughtfully licking his long, slender fingers clean afterwards.

The sight mesmerizes John. "Barbeque flavour is for lesser minds. Got it." His words are sarcastic, but his tone is amicable.

He's surprised to see that the edge of Sherlock's mouth actually creeps up to a slight smile which then gets quickly concealed behind a laminated coordinates list he theatrically lifts up to cover his face.

"What do you do for fun?" John asks. _Fuck Sherlock's rules about ignoring each other._

"I'm not here to have fun, I'm here to work."

"When you're _not_ working, then."

"I play the violin. Read. Go to the Thorrowgood telescope if it's not a public open evening. It's a brilliant piece of design, especially the achromatic double object glass."

The Thorrowgood and the Northumberland telescopes are Cambridge's historical ones. Built in 1864, the Thorrowgood was named after a patron named William John Thorrowgood who donated it to the university. The telescope is used by the members of the university's Astronomical Society, and the only research it sees nowadays is for double star measurements.

"I've only been to the other one. My dad took me there for an open evening when I was at school."

"Amateur astronomer?"

"Yeah. We had a small telescope at home."

"I built my own."

John chuckles. "Of course you did."

"As superior as radio astronomy is to visual observation in my line of work, I like looking directly at things instead of just seeing the written data. There's a perspective and a permanence to the cosmos I find reassuring."

"You don't think it's… I don't know, lonely, all that emptiness out there?"

Sherlock clears his throat. "As I said, I like the perspective it offers to how insignificant we and our small problems down here are, how short our lifespans."

"That's _consoling_ to you?"  

Sherlock shrugs. "Perhaps you have so many enjoyable things in your life to occupy yourself that philosophy doesn't concern you. Maybe you are having such a ball on this planet that you're convinced someone else out there, on some distant planet, is having an even bigger one you could be invited to."

Is Sherlock the opposite, then? _Doesn't sound like you're having much fun on this planet, so you don't believe there's anything better out there, either?_

"I was just making conversation," John finds himself excusing.

"Don't," Sherlock says, but his protest doesn't quite pack the punch it did before.

"I remember seeing the PleiadesCluster for the first time with our small old Orion. It was the colour which threw me; what's the point of all that beauty up there if there's no one to appreciate it? All those nebulas, galaxies, colourful stars…" John muses.

"It's just hydrogen and oxygen emission and orange dust absorption. Most commercially produced images of those celestial objects are what in we'd call false colours; the human eye's sensitive pattern to different parts of the colour spectrum is uneven and illogical, and we can't distinguish between very dark hues, so image editing is used to bring out those features."

John can't quite place the point of Sherlock's mini-lecture. "I know all that. I liked looking at those things just as you do, but for different reasons."

"I am dismissive of the beautiful and uncomprehending in the face of the happy. I can't provide you with a sense of camaraderie by pretending to enjoylooking at pretty things."

So, Sherlock goes to the Thorrowgood to feel…what? Less lonely by looking at distant, purposeless things floating in a vacuum?

Suddenly, John is awfully tempted to offer to go with him sometime, but he doubts the suggestion would go down well. It sounds like it's Sherlock's me-time.

John pushes the bag of crisps closer to him. Leaning back in his chair, waiting for a run of scans on the sub-brown dwarf WISE 0855-0714 located 2.23 parsecs from Earth, he watches Sherlock who soon appears lost to the world, utterly focused on his work. So focused, in fact, that he seems to forget John is there, and his carefully maintained superior nonchalance fades. In its place soon arrives a delicate expression that's hard to describe, except that to John it makes him look young and a bit apprehensive.

 _You look sad when you think no one can see you_.

  
-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

  
  
John remembers well the first time he'd heard of Sherlock Holmes. It was at a party at Selwyn College which John belonged to as an undergraduate student. They were playing a game, trying to come up with the most pornographic astronomical terms and there was an argument going on regarding whether the best one was the _coronal hole_ or the _ejecta blanket_. Someone suggested that even though _'Holmes always wins all the competition prizes, he'd suck at this one. Hasn't got a clue about humour_ '.

John had asked who they were talking about.

 _'That berk from Trinity, the tall skinny one with the hair like a mop?_ '

John had shaken his head.

 _'Anyway, he'd be completely lost with this. Nobody even knows if he's got a knob. Ignores all the girls, but I heard that since he's kind of fit, Stewart Radham tried to hit on him once and the guy told him he's 'married to his work'. Well, I'm sure even the work will eventually demand a messy divorce',_ was the reply, followed by laughter from all in attendance. _'He's an arsehole but he'll probably be here long after they kick the rest of us out, since apparently we're not geniuses like him_ ,' the drunken mathematics student added in a tone that seemed to signal the genius part was a quote. _'Nobody likes him,_ ' he added.

Now, as John watches the man in question working, a divot between his brows as he focuses hard as he skims a printout, John wonders if anyone really even knows Sherlock well enough to judge what he's really like. John would be an idiot not to spot how carefully he schools his expressions, how calculated his behaviour is and how easily he gets flummoxed when John surprises him even a little. It's logical that most people would think Sherlock kind of snooty and boring when he launches into lectures about something he's interested in, but not John. He can see the passion beneath, the barely contained formidable drive in him for the work. And, when he says things like "approximating the red shift intervals of quasars and integrating that into degradation of mass" he doesn't sound dry, he sounds… so goddamned _hot_ , John reluctantly admits.

Maybe it's just the allure of what one can't have. John can hardly imagine Sherlock dating anyone—letting go of that careful control long enough to kiss someone, to make love to someone. He's got issues, that's for sure. His drug use doesn't look like it's just to help him focus. He must be way past that point in his addiction. John can only guess at whether something else had motivated it at first. Social lubricant? Or chemical company in his obvious solitude?

John shakes his head, determinedly averting his eyes from admiring the shape of the man. John hasn't got laid in ages, so that's why this is happening, that's why he's wasting time on the futile endeavour of analysing the sex life of someone he doesn't even know. Nobody does, and clearly Sherlock Holmes wants to keep it that way.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

On Saturday night, it's still terribly hot outside and even worse inside the shack so even Sherlock finally caves. He digs out a grey T-shirt from his bag and changes into it in the loo. John finds the primness of that endearing; in the army he got used to stripping naked and scrubbing his bollocks clean in the shower in the presence of plenty of other men. Shouldn't the same acclimatisation happened to Sherlock at whatever posh public school he must have gone to, assuming he wasn't a day boy?

"The heat is getting on my nerves," Sherlock announces after re-emerging, glass of water in his hand. John noticed that he has changed his trousers, too—to a pair of dove grey linen chinos. They look a size too big.

"This damned shack heats up during the day; it should be cooler outside, now," John points out. "We could walk to the edge of the woods, get some fresh air, if you're at a stage in your work where you can leave the computers to it for a while?"

Sherlock bites his lip, narrows his eyes. John can't know what he's processing—whether he is just considering the practicalities of his research or trying to decide if he actually wants to go on a walk with his current company.

Regardless, the answer is yes. Sherlock says nothing but puts his shoes on, then stands by the door looking shyly expectant. John slips into the hay-scented air outside behind him.

It won't get dark tonight until much later, but the sun is lounging lazily close to the horizon, colouring the landscape in hues of orange and red.

"Scattering," Sherlock says as though he'd just read John's mind. "The colours. Close to the horizon, sunlight has to travel through more atmospheric molecules than it does earlier in the day. Molecules and small particles change the direction of the light rays, causing them to scatter, which produces colours the details of which are determined by the light's wavelength and particle size."

John knows all this, and most astronomy students would likely be offended by Sherlock telling them such elementary stuff, but to John it doesn't feel like the man is trying to educate him. Maybe this is simply Sherlock's way of saying _'look at how pretty the sky is_ '?

"They scatter the violet and blue wavelengths the most, hence the dominance of red, yellow and orange," John confirms as they begin a leisurely walk towards the trees in the distance. "And, yeah, I think they're pretty, too."

They take a path skirting Wimpole Road towards Bourn Brook, then look for an opening in the heavy bushes by the stream. Underneath the canopy of trees it's much cooler, and the sound of the water is soothing. There are some crunched-up beer cans by a few rocks suitable for sitting, and the grass in the spot is worn, signalling that they're not the first ones to find this place. Sherlock sits down on a lusher patch of grass behind one of the larger rocks in the background, leaning his back against it. John drops down next to him, and his offer of a swig from his water bottle gets declined.

"So, you always wanted to do astronomy?" he asks.

"One doesn't _do_ astronomy, one studies it." Sherlock's tone is thoughtful.

"Well, anyway."

"As a child I may have announced I wanted to be Einstein, before I realised that one cannot become famous people, only emulate them. I read his _Essays in Science_ when I was twelve, and it confirmed that it hardly matters which precise field of nature sciences one chose; they all have a common core, a shared language. They're all just perspectives into the same thing. Physics dictate chemical interactions, mathematics govern the laws of physics."

"I guess I've not really thought of those connections much," John admits. He hadn't found biology very interesting, but he does recall being told that in many ways it's simply biochemistry on a bigger scale.

Sherlock read Einstein at _twelve_? At that age, John had been mostly reading comics.

"Physics, mathematics, astronomy, even chemistry—it all merges in radio astronomy. And, you are combining biology into the mix by searching for life. And, what is astronomy if not geography on a cosmological scale?"

"How's it going with your project?"

"I find the software for adjusting the telescopes archaic, at best. Programming is not something I have looked into extensively, but I just might if I have to deal with such obscure, unintuitive user interfaces again."

"Yeah, the post-its drive me nuts," John confirms. The wall above the array adjustment gear is plastered with post-it notes containing helpful hints on getting things done right instead of tearing out one's hair trying to guess how some function can be turned on or off.

Sherlock picks up a pebble and flings it into the stream. Underneath the glass-clear surface, shapes of fish scatter, frightened. To John he seems more relaxed than he had been in the shack.

 _He always seems less on his guard when we discuss science_ , John decides. _I guess it's safer than talking about himself._ " What happens after you get your PhD?" John asks. "Have they made you a formal offer of post-doc work yet?"

Sherlock hums in affirmation, twisting his fingers around strands of longer grass. "The tenure track position that has been opened for applications… I have been told I should apply; that I would be the strongest candidate for it once my PhD's done. It would enable the founding of my own research group. Comes with a significant grant earmarked for whoever gets the position."

"That's great," John comments, managing to keep envy out of his tone. "Everyone knows Glendale will retire in about ten years. You'd probably become the youngest professor in the history of the department, well, maybe the whole of natural sciences." John knows he'd be lucky to even get a lower tier teaching position. A post-doctoral research fellowship is out of the question. _Not everyone's a genius._

"Being in a position like that, even just for the tenure track period involves… Never mind." Sherlock's lips tighten into a resigned line.

"Managing money? Managing people? Teaching? Supervising work instead of doing it yourself?" John wouldn't mind the last three, but he wouldn't enjoy the fiscal responsibility, either.

"I worry some of those things might make or break my career, yet they have nothing at all to do with science. I can do that part, I know it.The rest of it is just _boring, tedious._ "

There is something so angry in the dismissal that there has to be more than boredom and tedium there that's bothering Sherlock. But, he doubts Sherlock would be willing to put it to words. He's already reticent to discuss this.

John nods, because he understands at least Sherlock's fear that time would be eaten up by things not directly related to research. He's seen it happen: the most gifted ones get pushed up the organisational ladder which seems a bit counter-intuitive since it means more of their time will be taken up by bureaucracy and the practical side of running a unit than what can be dedicated to science.

Sherlock scoots to the left so that he can lie down in the cool grass. John does the same. The sun is gilding the leaves above them golden.

"Maybe you could delegate some of that?" John suggests.

Sherlock scoffs. "Who'd have me for a co-chair or collaborator?" The question is clearly rhetorical.

"Well, lots of people, I'm sure."

"Lots of people, no. A few, yes, but they would fall under two categories: those looking to use it as a springboard for a higher position and those who have never met me but would change their minds once they had."

John opens his mouth to protest—not that he has in mind anything very good or specific to offer for countering Sherlock's self-deprecation.

Sherlock isn't finished. He turns to his side to watch John, the sharp focus of his gaze studying every line on his facial features. "What ifthis is the best part? Doing the work, nobody bothering us with administrative nonsense. Right here, right now, waiting for that new data, testing our hypotheses."

John doesn't shy away from his scrutiny. Instead, he's tempted to reach out, to push aside the errant curl that must be tickling Sherlock's left brow. To cup a cheek, to card his fingers into the silky curls framing the back of that long neck. He feels giddy, drunk on simply existing in the moment. _Maybe he's right and this is the best part._ John's future is even bigger a question mark.

"I'm perfect right now," John says quietly, injecting just enough weight into his words that they fall short of innuendo but are laden with hints of more. It doesn't feel dangerous, doesn't feel like flirting; it's simply a statement of the fact that, though Sherlock has done his best to repel him, he's still the most interesting thing that has happened to John in ages. Much more interesting than his languishing PhD, that's for sure.

Soon, Sherlock seems to be slightly spooked by the intensity with which John is returning his curiosity, and he turns his head to look up at the thin, wispy clouds and patches of blue sky above.

"Cirrus clouds," John offers.

" _Cirrus uncinus_ , to be precise," Sherlock adds. "The hooks and curls at the end, you see."

 _I see you_ , John thinks instead.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

"How idiotic do ufologists think these aliens are, since they apparently need to repeat the same elementary acts a million times? Can't they beam up a bloody library book and check out all the research humanity has already done on last fifty centimetres of the gastrointestinal tract without having to abduct countless humans to study their anatomy? There is little purpose to any of the classic descriptions of tests done on alien abductees," Sherlock argues.

"So," John smirks, "if all this is so beneath you, how are you so well-versed in _classic descriptions of alien abductions_?"

A patrician shrug. "I like to read."

"No, I don't believe that four million Americans have been abducted, whatever the results of that Roper poll were," John counters in an exasperated tone. "There would have to be thousands of alien crews at work every night, avoiding detection somehow. Wouldn't that start to show in employee absence statistics if so many people got whisked out of their bedrooms every night?"

"Sorry, couldn't come to work, got abducted again," Sherlock chuckles. "Even in the era of smartphones, little tangible photographic or video evidence of UFOs has emerged."

"Then again, even if it did, would anyone believe it? Anyone can now obtain the necessary gear for some very impressive photoshopping. In all seriousness, though—there _is_ the Drake equation."

"A piece of speculative _fiction_ over seventy years of age."

"We know a lot more, now, regarding what the numbers used should be."

"It only applies to civilizations within this galaxy. There are countless others," Sherlock says, surprising John.

"So, you're saying the odds could be much greater than what we assume?"

"I am not refuting the possibility of intelligent life in the universe. What I am refuting is basing a lot of paperwork on an equation with more uncertainty factors than any scientist worth their salt should be comfortable with. In Drake's time, it wasn't even known whether it couldbe considered a general rule that stars are orbited by planets and we still don't know whether that only applies in this galaxy. Most calculations have used 1,5–3 new stars per year as their estimate for new star creation, but even my research alone shows that the rate varies so much that the median would actually be 4. Still, I think the biggest uncertainty factor is not even included in the equation."

"Which is?"

"Assuming these aliens saw transmissions of some of our current TV programming, would they even _want_ to communicate with us?"

John laughs. "I think you just solved the Fermi Paradox."

It's now twilight; crickets have taken over from birds as the dominant source of noise. The surrounding roads are quiet, and none of the fields in the vicinity have animals. Star are coming out; Venus is already bright near the horizon.

They are now walking across a small plank bridge over Tit Brook towards the main courtyard after wondering all the way to Interplanetary Scintillary Array which had discovered the first pulsar. Sheep are used to keep the grass from growing over it since lawn mowers can't fit between certain parts. It's been a dry start to the summer, so the animals haven't been brought in yet. The Array is now mostly retired; its last significant tasks had involved tracking solar wind and interplanetary weather.

Back on the path that will take them back to the bunker past the One-Mile Telescope, John checks his watch. "Shit. Let's hurry; I need to make my next adjustment in ten."

But, once he's standing by the control console back in the shack, his plan changes. As he takes in the sight of the latest reading, John's eyes go wide. " _Fuck_."

"Something wrong?" Sherlock closes the door and joins him by the console.

"This is–– _fuck me sideways_ ," John breathes out, "Look at this. Sherlock, _look at this_!" He thrusts the printouts into the man's hands from where a few sheets nearly slip out.

Sherlock quickly skims through them. "The frequency shift is remarkable. Does this mean––"

" _Yes_!" John shouts. "Yes, it bloody does! Turns out I don't have to find intelligent life; all I needed to prove that certain radio frequencies which would be functional for communication can be reflected between two non-emitting planetary objects as long as there are no stars too close belonging to Secchi types II or III!"

"Or those in the Wolf-Rayet spectra."

John licks his lower lip. "Yeah, you're right." He grabs a post-it and jots down _'use Draper AND Secchi_ ' to remember to feature both star classification systems when he starts typing all this up.

"Looks like you've got your PhD," Sherlock comments slightly wistfully.

A triumphant but still slightly disbelieving grin spreads on John's face. He slams his palms on Sherlock's biceps and fixes him in place in his enthusiasm. Sherlock stiffens slightly. "I did it! Sherlock, I fucking did it;I just had to find the right system to scan." He lets go of Sherlock's arms after giving him a frantic shake, grabs the printouts which Sherlock had put on the table, and moves them to his pile on another desk.

"We gotta go celebrate. Right now, you and me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox are real, and they are attempts at dealing with the strange maths related to the notion of alien life. The Drake Equation seeks to calculate how many civilisations may be lurking out there and the Fermi Paradox asks that if there should be so damned many of them, why hasn't ET phoned us yet?
> 
> Personally, I find it somewhat disappointing that the definitive UFO video hasn't graced Youtube yet. Everyone's got a cameraphone so come on, snap those Greys! Then again, that would scare the living daylights out of me. Anyone looking for one of the most fascinating and credible accounts of UFO activity, google _Lakenheath-Bentwaters_ or the _Rendlesham Forest Incident_ and get shudders. Both are British cases.
> 
> As for whatever John is doing with that fancy radio telescope, I still have no idea.


	5. Thermal Runaway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was both exhilarated and very frightened to hear that we have a real astrophysics students amid the readership! Welcome, and I am so, _so_ sorry. Particularly about this chapter. *grin*

Sherlock looks like John has just suggesting bungee jumping without a rope. " _Celebrate_? I can't celebrate, I have work to do."

John deflates. "Oh, right, yeah, sorry, your project. But maybe I could help you?"

Sherlock emanates scepticism. "A sudden confidence boost, I see. I doubt you could make much of what I'm attempting."

"Yesterday I was clever and now I'm a dunce, though I just pioneered a method to look for radio communications in deep space instead of waiting for those signals to travel all the way here. But, what do I know?" John shrugs and chuckles, still giddy over the realisation Sherlock had verbalised: this seals the deal on his PhD. All he needs to do now is to type up the damned thing. The science part of it is done.

Sherlock, leaning a palm on the control console desk, brings up his settings for the Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope. "I'm getting too much noise from what I assume is Betelgeuse; it's difficult to know for sure without visual. I do have the coordinates, but there are several red giants in that direction, and I'm not sure how far the interference from some of the more distant ones could affect the CAT.

"Betelgeuse is a pulsating red star, isn't it?"

"Elementary, John."

"Well, as I recall it's variance periods are more than two thousand days long but not hundreds of years; it's a well-known stellar body so there must be records of its most intense overtone pulsations as opposed to the lower maxims during active periods."

"It's more complicated than that. The secondary periods aren't due to radial pulsations; most likely it's chromospheric magnetic activity influencing mass loss."

"Are you sure? I think there was an article lately claiming that it would be likelier that they are close binary interactions. And why would it matter? If you know the maxim, you can simply compare it to what you get from the optical aperture and look at the values outside the ones that match."

Sherlock frowns. Soon, he begins pacing, hands steepled so that the tips of his forefingers are resting on his mandible. "This isn't one of Betelgeuse's discrete dominant periods. If I integrate the red shift data from the optical, estimate radial velocity changes so that I can eliminate activity variance from my main calculations…That _could_ give me at least a confidence interval to compare the Teffof Betelgeuse now to what I already have extracted from a much younger star with a similar composition…"

"What's that got to do with red shift, then?" It seems that Sherlock had been right, after all—John can't entirely follow the marriage of modern astrophysics and advanced red shift mathematics involved.

Suddenly Sherlock stops in his tracks and looks as though John's stupidity has downright spooked him. He looks up at the ceiling, eyes closer, muttering. Then, his eyes fly open and he inhales sharply. "John, you are a _genius_! Well, if not genius, then… It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it in others–––"He strides to his laptop and begins pounding away furiously. "John, grab the Stephenson's from the shelf and give me the data for a bright giant, _any_ bright giant, as long as it has an Mv of at least minus one, and has established mass transfer."

John nearly trips over his own backpack as he scrambles for the bookcase. The _Stephenson's General Catalogue of Galactic Carbon Stars_ is a tome indexing over seven thousand objects in deep space. "You could use Zeta Arietis, parallax shift of 12.44 mas."

"Yes, yes, _yes_ , give it to me," Sherlock snaps impatiently, hand extended to grab the book John brings him. He skims the page, finds the values he needs and inputs them into his calculations. "Bright giants have astounding CH absorption, making them exemplary study subjects of matter degradation. Besides, they are very stable. If I take the tagged partition of the normalised red shift data…Use the Henstock-Kurtzweil to integrate degradation rates of carbon isotopes measured from both Betelgeuse and Arietis… I'll have to do this with both monotone convergence and dominated convergence to please that imbecile at the CMS who is in my evaluation committee––"

John walks up to him to see the equations on Sherlock's laptop screen. He shakes his head. He knows the basics of integral calculus and the bit of extra he had needed for some theoretical physics courses, but mathematics has never been anything he has excelled in. What Sherlock is currently doing is outstandingly modern integral calculus taken to the extreme to solve a cosmological problem. John can't help but whistle. "Amazing."

"It'll only be amazing if it works." Sherlock types in more, his fingers whirlwind fast. "I need one more set of readings from Betelgeuse to decrease my error margin. The CAT should be able to do that overnight."

The most manic edge of his enthusiasm now gone, he goes to the control console to change the settings of that telescope. Finally, he straightens his back and turns to face John. His expression is an odd mix of hopeful and content. "Done. I should be able to finish my calculations tomorrow."

"Well, come on, then," John prompts, "Now we _have_ to celebrate!"

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-  
  


The nearest village, Barton, is two miles away. The evening has brought with it a cooling wind and Sherlock insists he doesn't mind walking, but John devises the perfect solution: his bicycle is an army-issue surplus, and sturdy as hell. It will easily carry two. Without listening to Sherlock's protests, he grabs the old, ugly thing he rarely locks even in town, and walks it to the front steps of the shack. He then unceremoniously swings his leg over the bar and turns his head to beckon Sherlock.

Looking highly sceptical, he primly arranges his bottom of the rack as though expecting it to get bitten. He leaves both his legs on the right side of the bike.

"Ladies' saddle?" John jokes.

"I have long legs; easier to just keep them to the side and lift them a bit. I'll be less likely to accidentally interfere with your pedalling."

Sherlock wraps his arms tentatively around John's waist, and off they kick. It takes a moment to find the right balance, and without gears the pedalling is heavy with two people on top, but John manages. This'll be his exercise for the weekend.

He wonders if Sherlock ever does any sports. His physique looks like that of a dancer's—or, on second thought, maybe too much a twig to have the required muscles. He's the very antithesis of a rugby lad. John had played some footie when he was younger, but he enjoyed chasing girls more than he did chasing a ball, and he was never going to be very good at the latter, anyway.

With the women he's always had some talent with. Not that there have been that many women—or men—since he came home from the military. None, actually. He hasn't felt like it. One-night stuff, just having fun, doesn't hold the same allure anymore. He's not had many long-term relationships so far; the people who have interested him beyond just a night between the sheets he's not been that keen on.

He doesn't advertise the fact that he's bi. Since women are _also_ his thing and he doesn't really date people long enough to have to present them as a regular partner, it hasn't felt worth the fuss to go through the trouble of coming out and all that. It's just easier this way. So much easier. Even if it's admittedly a bit less honest.

They come to a downhill, and Sherlock's arms around him tighten. His warm chest pressed against John's sweaty back combined with the smell of some undoubtedly posh shampoo mixing with summer flowers in the air is intoxicating. John has just cracked the final problem in his PhD, it's summertime, it's a lovely evening, and there's someone downright gorgeous clinging to him with the hopes of not falling off a bicycle into a ditch.

Life is good.

  
-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

The Hoops on School Lane in Barton is heaving with Saturday night punters. The pub is small, housed in an old cream-coloured house with a moss-laden tile roof and small, misshapen Yew trees up front. A plaque above the door announces that the building was first registered as a pub in 1776 but had served as an alehouse even before that.

After leaning the bike against the side of the front entrance John strides in, Sherlock in tow. All the tables are taken but two bar stools upholstered with faded pink velvet are still without patrons. John hops onto the leftmost one, patting the other as an invitation.

The publican, a fifty-something man with a carefully cultivated moustache, appears. "What can I get ya lads?"

John glances up at the chalk board list. "I'll have a Barton Bitter."

"That's from Moonshine Brewery. Good choice."

"Sherlock?" John asks.

His companion looks unsure. John wonders if he goes to pubs often. Or ever.

"The…St Peters Honey Porter?" Sherlock asks, sounding like he's asking for a root canal.

"Used to be called Chalky's Bite," their host laughs. "They say it tastes a bit like coffee-flavoured hard candy."

The word 'coffee' seems to go down well with Sherlock. "I'll have …one."

"Comes in an oh point five bottle," the publican says, and reaches down to a fridge behind him to produce one. He pours it into a pint glass.

Sherlock eyes it as though he's never seen anything that big, and John smirks secretly.

"Tourists?" the publican asks after delivering John his pint of bitter.

"Grad students." John cocks his head towards the south. "We're at Mullard for the weekend."

Sherlock is eyeing the other patrons warily as he takes his first sip of the ale. He blinks, frowns, stares into the brown liquid. "It's… acceptable."

The publican laughs. "I'll be sure to let the guys at the brewery know," he jokes.

"That's not very high praise," Sherlock says, confused. "Why would you––"

John needs to come to his rescue. "What's with all the chickens?" he asks the man behind the counter. The pub's walls and side tables are laden with chicken-themed statues and mementos and there are photos and paintings of various poultry-related country scenes on all the walls.

"My dad used to keep Wyandotte bantams, had a pen in the back of the house. His cockerel, Barry White, was famous in these parts. The old man's in care, now, me and the wife took over the place eight years ago. Used to run a café in Cambridge but the competition's fierce, now, with all these chain restaurants and big brewery franchise places cropping up all over."

John assumes Wyandotte bantams are chickens. Poultry wouldn't be anything he'd excel at in Trivial Pursuit. He makes a mental note never to play it with Sherlock; he'd probably wipe the floor with everyone else. _Unless it was about sport. Or entertainment. Or beer._ Their discussions this weekend have established that Sherlock has no interest in pop culture, the comings and goings of sports teams, politics or celebrities. _Doesn't even know who the bloody prime minister is!_ All in all, Sherlock doesn't seem to follow any current events unless they pertain to science.

Someone turns on an old jukebox in the corner, and it begins pounding out an old The Police track. Sherlock looks put-upon.

"Have you got any family near here?" John asks, wiping a bit of froth off his lips with a napkin.

"No. My parents live in Surrey; they're retired. My oldest brother, Mycroft, lives and works in London. The middle one, Sherrinford, is a restauranteur in Cardiff."

"What do—did your parents do?"

"My mother was a chemistry professor at Imperial College, my father a county court judge."

John realises Sherlock isn't asking him anything in return. Maybe he's not interested. Social reciprocation is clearly not his forte, so John isn't surprised. "My parents are dead. I've got a sister, Harry. The last I heard of her, she was in Bangladesh. Photojournalist."

"Oh."

"So there's no… you're not dating, then?"

"Didn't we exhaust this topic?" Sherlock is scanning the list of beverages above them again, though he has barely taken five sips of his first drink.

John sighs. "It's just something people talk about."

"When they go to pubs, you mean? With friends?" Something about Sherlock's tone conveys that none of those things are a part of his usual reality.

John doesn't quite know what to say.

"It's not my area… girlfriends, I mean," Sherlock phrases carefully. "That is, if you must know. If this is somehow necessary to establish."

John nods, trying to parse the explanation. "You don't date, then, or you don't, with…girls?" There is the curious case of the missing military pages.

Sherlock's eyes are downright pleading him to parse it together.

"Oh. _OH_. So, yeah, okay," John manages, trying to sound encouraging. Did he get it right, or is Sherlock referring to some really obscure version of a sexual orientation nobody has ever heard about? _Did_ he get it right?

"Besides, it's patronising to speak of _girls_ when referring to women our age," Sherlock says dryly.

John cocks his head towards the publican piling empty cardboard boxes for wine bottles in a side room with the door open. "He just called us lads."

"It's not the same."

A silence follows. John doesn't quite know whether to continue on this sudden feminist path or to try another topic.

In the end, Sherlock breaks the lull in conversation. "Do you ever think about the Boötes Void?"

"Think about it? Like, how?"

"It's an empty space, _The Great Nothing_. It interests people because of what it lacks, but nobody really studies it. Nobody pays it much mind, because there's nothing there to look at. Just a curiosity that makes people uneasy. It makes me uneasy. If the reionisation took place the way everyone says it did, then why are there places where there are nearly no stars? Even if the Void only exists from the perspective of our location, it still means that there is an absolute area of lower density there. I worry that everyone—me included—are underestimating dark matter."

"Why would you expect the universe to be perfectly symmetrical, for stuff to be the same everywhere? There are plenty of other voids like that," John reminds him. "Other parts of the cosmos that don't seem to be the way the rest of space is. And, haven't they found like sixty galaxies in the void? Doesn't sound very empty to me; maybe it's the most interesting spot in the universe, and people just don't realise it because they only see the surface level. There could be anything there, beautiful things worth studying. Intelligent life, even."

"You and your aliens." Sherlock sounds dismissive.

"Well, me and my aliens need to void something alright," John jokes and slides off his barstool. He finds the gents and relieves himself. When he comes back, Sherlock's half-litre pint is empty, and there's a whisky in front of him. The peatiness of it wafts into John's nose and the gorgeous amber colour probably means it's not from the cheapest bottle behind the counter.

John retakes his seat and raises his pint to chink together with Sherlock's tumbler. "To science, then."

"To science," Sherlock confirms, looking much less sour.


	6. Cataclysmic Variables

 

"Mycroft thought it was the best Christmas ever, since he got to sit in the fire truck." Sherlock is grinning after concluding a story about one of his teenage experiments gone awry. His cheeks are slightly rosy, eyes twinkling with amusement and John can't tear his eyes away from the sight, even if his vision is swimming a little.

 _You have a nice smile,_ John thinks. _You should use it more_.

They had grabbed a table when one became available, shared a portion of chips and are now on their fourth or fifth drinks. _Or maybe sixth_ , John wonders. Sherlock has been taking it slower than him and is much less inebriated. John is enjoying the buzz of all the beer, even if it means frequent trips to the loo.

"You know," John starts, peeling his forefinger off the pint he's holding and pointing it at Sherlock. "Maybe you have what I want, and maybe I have what you want," he drawls.

"Is that so?" Sherlock's gaze is fixed on him.

"You don't get out much, do you," John announces and grins triumphantly. "I have friends, but you're smarter than me."

"Obviously."

"But you said that I––what was it, _colluminate_ light?"

Sherlock's studies the bottom of his whisky glass. "I said that some people have talent in conducting the light of intelligence in others."

"So maybe we could… hang, and maybe you could help me out with my thesis," John announces. It's a good plan. It's a _great_ plan. Sherlock will see that. Mostly, it's a great plan because he likes looking at and listening to Sherlock and wants that on a regular basis. At least right now. And as long as Sherlock is not acting as mean as he usually is.

"I'm sure you can get your aliens in a row without me."

"Don't want your name on my populist drivel?" John teases.

"I never called it that. It will be a legitimate body of work."

"I think that's the nicest thing you've said to me."

Sherlock frowns; a V-shaped divot forms between his shapely brows, and John is momentarily mesmerised by the sight. He leans forward in his chair, and their knees touch under the table. Sherlock shifts his leg away, but with a delay.

The air is suddenly heavy between them. _Am I imagining things?_ John wonders. _He hasn't left, he hasn't run away_. _This is nice; he must think it's nice, too_.

"So, what I'm saying is, maybe we can tell the Great Fucking Boat Void to get stuffed," John giggles. _Fuck_. He's probably getting a bit too drunk for Sherlock's taste. He's mildly annoyed at how collected and prim the man sitting across from him still looks and can't help wondering what it would take to get Sherlock to crack that facade, to get him to act… more human. _More like the rest of everybody people_ , John concludes with a nod.

"The… Boat Void?" Sherlock asks with a sly rise of his brow which John clearly isn't imagining.

The guy knows how to flirt, after all. Or, at least John has decided to interpret it as such. _Who knows what that gesture even means on Planet Sherlock Holmes…_ John decides he would very much like to explore the surface and nooks and crannies of such a strange, new world.

"It doesn't have to be so lonely. Space, I mean," he says, slurring a little. _I can be cryptic, too_. _Let's see if you take it as well as you give it_.

"I don't think you have the power to influence that," Sherlock says, pushes the now empty basket of chips aside and down the rest what remains in his glass.

John downs the rest of his umpteenth pint. Cycling home, especially with cargo, might be a problem in his current state, but they can always walk. It's a nice night. He would very much like to walk around in it with Sherlock.

When they get outside, Sherlock goes to collect the unlocked bicycle and they head towards Cambridge Road—although, where it skirts the edges of the closest fields to Barton it's known as Wimpole Road, as Sherlock conscientiously points out.

A soft mist is shrouding the landscape in the lower parts of fields. Up where they are, the sky is still clear, and they get into a competition of naming constellations. John has no doubt as to who will win but he's holding his own, especially since the alcohol's interference with his memory is now fading.

"Jupiter?" Sherlock asks, moving to planets and stars.

John points towards the southeast. "Vega," he counters.

Sherlock wastes no time in pointing at the bright star right above them. "Elementary."

"Everything is elementary for you, isn't it," John sighs with a smile.

"Not everything. Not… people." Sherlock swallows. "Capella?"

"I don't want to play anymore," John complains, and hurries his steps to catch up with the taller man. He reaches out to take over walking the bike, and briefly covers Sherlock's hand with his own on the rails. Sherlock doesn't withdraw his, and John plucks up the courage to brush his thumb briefly across his knuckles. It's intoxicating, the combination of liquid courage coursing through his veins and the sight of starlight reflected in Sherlock's eyes when he looks up to name things which have neither a soul nor any interest in the comings and goings of humans.

 _Is this what you did when you were little and lonely?_ John wonders. _Looked at the sky to see something bigger and more important than yourself?_

Sherlock slowly pulls his hand away, retreats a bit from John's proximity. He sticks his hands into his pockets and seems to withdraw into himself—as though John's innocent dismissal of their game had been a more severe rejection.

"This is nice," John offers. "I like the countryside. Did you see the stars well from where you lived as a kid?"

"Yes. I never slept well, but seeing the stars calmed me. Still do."

After a moment, he notices Sherlock watching him carefully. "What?"

"Psychosomatic confirmed, then."

"What?" John is still too drunk to be fast enough for Sherlock's deductions.

"Your limp. Or… should I say lack thereof? It hasn't presented itself today at all. Psychosomatic is what I suspected, but that begs the question what they based your medical discharge on if the limp is–––"

 _If he says psychosomatic one more time…_ John grits his teeth. "Shoulder. That's what I wrecked in the crash. Torn tendons, banged-up nerve. They told me that the limp is _was_ … reactive I think was the word."

Perhaps due to John's suddenly irritated tone, Sherlock averts his gaze.

They walk in silence, the sounds of crickets and the occasional nocturnal bird offering accompaniment to the sounds of their steps. John sobers up more with the exercise, and his thinking appears to be sobering up, too.

What happens when they get back to the shack? _Will_ something happen? Is there any way to read Sherlock right? John wants things, he wants… What would be the harm? They're adults, they're single, they're alone out here. Why not see where this could lead? Even if it's just a bit of fun…

 _Sherlock doesn't go for 'a bit of fun', does he?_ Something tells John that he really, really doesn't. There's a thorough seriousness to everything he does and says. _He wouldn't be reckless like that_ , John decides; _he guards himself too carefully_. There's a fragility there, too, which is almost discouraging enough to make John abandon all thoughts of initiating anything. But, it's not as though he's about to use someone and then push them away? He's open to options, more than he ever has. He hasn't really dated a bloke, hasn't been in bed with a bloke much, or in a long time, but…

 _God, Sherlock is gorgeous_. He'd be the most beautiful thing John has ever had, and John is still plenty drunk enough to admit that.

They have now arrived back to the hut and Sherlock lets them in. Standing in the dark in the middle of the room, neither makes a move for the light switch. They… linger, watching each other in the near-dark. In the dim light provided by one of the blinking green computer panels, John can see that Sherlock is nervously fingering the fabric of his trouser leg while standing by the bed.

 _Sod it_. _Nothing to lose_ , John decides.

He crosses the distance between them, tilts his head and goes straight for a kiss, curls his fingers into Sherlock's bony shoulders, careful to sense any hesitation that might materialize when he deepens the first gentle brush of lips into a harder, devouring thing. Sherlock makes a faint noise—half a hum and half a yes—and wraps his arms eagerly around John's neck, pressing himself against him. If John's still tipsy senses are serving him accurately, they're both hard, and he reaches down to make sure. Sherlock gasps when his palm comes into contact with the front of his trousers, the hard need there apparent through what must be thin silk and perhaps cotton pants beneath. Sherlock bends his neck, tears his mouth off John's and begins nipping kisses down his neck.

"I don't, really, that much with blokes, you know, but you're just so… kind of…" John mutters, lost to the world and the feeling of Sherlock's lips on his Adam's apple.

Sherlock freezes, and his fingers grasp John's collar to stop the proceedings, to hold him at half an arm's length. "John, I––What is this, then?" he demands, suddenly glaring daggers.

"I didn't mean it like that, I mean, I–– I want this. Don't you?"

Sherlock wipes his mouth on the back of his palm.

John is envious of that palm. _I want to know what you taste like_.

"You want something you can forget? A bit of fun to replace your hand and those magazines? I must be convenient since _nobody will ever know_ ," Sherlock sing-songs mockingly, "Who would ever believe Sherlock Holmes could get it off with someone? Well, good that we've established your motives." He grabs a chair and plants his bottom on it, rolling it to his laptop. His shoulders are held tight, and a shiver runs through him as he adjusts his trousers slightly.

John studies the sight of his turned back, feeling whiplashed and slightly cross-eyed. "Sorry, that's not—Okay, yeah, okay. Yeah, I didn't even ask if you––sorry," he stumbles over his tongue, spreads his arms in supplication. "Sherlock, I…"

"You're drunk. I need to work."

Defeated, John drops down onto the bed. _Fuck_. He should stick to his decision not to do this with blokes. It's too complicated. _Girls are nice enough_ , he thinks and then remember Sherlock chastising him for such a belittling choice of words. _Women are nice_. _What happened here was just a momentary lapse in judgement._

"Sorry," he mutters to no one and nothing in particular, rolls to his side and falls asleep.

  
-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

The next morning, John wonders if he should pretend nothing happened. Which one will be more embarrassed, him or his strange companion? It's clear that Sherlock isn't very good at, well, people, so maybe John should extend the olive branch. Then again, he hadn't done anything very terribly wrong, had he? He'd extended an offer which had been declined. Sherlock is so damned difficult to read, and he'd kissed John back, hadn't he?

John watches him jotting down notes on the side of a printout with a pencil, then chew the end. He doesn't seem to realise John is awake yet. _He looks… alright_ , John decides. Calm, aloof—his default mode. The hairs on the back of John's neck are telling him to leave well enough alone.

So of course he doesn't. "Morning."

Sherlock looks up, just a whip of his neck up and back down again, barely a glance at John. "Morning."

"About last night."

"That's not even a full sentence. Unnecessary to discuss, I assure you."

"Sorry," John says.

"For attempting discussion or for what happened?" Sherlock's eyes are fixed on his papers so hard that John fears he'll burn a hole in them.

"Yeah, um, for what happened."

"My experiences in the area have been nothing but disinteresting, confounding and uncomfortable. In your state of inebriation, I can't see why last night could have been any different."

"Not much of a vote of confidence for my skills as a lover," John jokes sheepishly.

"I have no data regarding that. I don't speculate on such matters."

 _Alright, alright, Mister Literal._ "Well, maybe if I hadn't had so many last night, I could have deduced you weren't really interested."

Sherlock shrugs; it's more of a twitch of his shoulders, really—as if he wants to banish this conversation like a bothersome gnat. "Such things are just hormonal. A momentary lapse in judgement on both our parts. Forget it."

"Okay," John says, resigned. He eats some bread without butter and without bothering to taste it. His hangover is mild, nothing to warrant a day kipping with paracetamol. He does drink two glasses of water and grimace at the bags under his eyes in the bathroom mirror.

_Hormonal or not, it was still so nice._

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

They pack up in the afternoon.

"Did you get what you wanted?" John asks. "The data, I mean," he hastily adds.

Sherlock shades his eyes with his hand in the blistering sun while John locks the door from the outside. "Some of it, yes. If my time hadn't been eaten into by trivial things, I could have achieved more." His tone is biting.

John decides not to apologise again. Their pub crawl and the disaster afterwards had only lasted a few hours and that can't be long enough to wreck Sherlock's plans; he's not going to say sorry just for existing.

"I will likely need to negotiate another weekend or at least one day more here," Sherlock muses. "If there only hadn't been so many useless distractions. It wasn't a waste of time, at least. There is the hint of a breakthrough."

"Well, good."

John expects Sherlock to just march off into the, well, _not_ sunset, but instead the man extends his hand primly for shaking.

"It was interesting," Sherlock comments. His grip is neither hard nor delicate as his long, slender fingers curl around John's. It's odd to get to enjoy such an unhurried feel of them now, after they've already kissed.

"Sure," John agrees, then heads for the side of the shack to get his bike. "See you around."

"Possibly," Sherlock says, and puts his sunglasses on.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

For John, the next weeks are a frenzy of writing, assembling all the requisite paperwork for his PhD process and enjoying the summer with friends and colleagues. He assumes it must be the same for Sherlock, though the man can probably type the whole thing up in a weekend and then write five extra articles on top for fun.

John tries not to think about him much. Their paths haven't converged significantly before their Mullard weekend, and their research projects are not related. They're not even working in the same building. Yet, he keeps scanning the crowds for a glimpse of a blackish mop of curly hair, for a flicker of a well-tailored suit, for a glance from a strange-coloured pair of eyes framed by the sharpest cheekbones John has ever seen.

Sherlock had stumbled into his life and out of it so quickly that he feels a bit sideswiped by the experience still. What would he say to Sherlock if they saw each other again? He keeps daydreaming about a chance encounter at the Heffers Bookshop, at a café, shoulders brushing against one another's in an afternoon rush to get home from the Astronomy Institute building on Madingley Road.

He should have said something nice. About Sherlock's smile, maybe. That he should use it more. If he worries about getting along with the future members of the research group he's bound to get the funding for he should just relax, be himself. Sherlock can be fun when he's not too nervous. He can be so interesting. Fascinating. Amazing.

It's a near magnetic pull John feels, but with no direction. He doesn't even know where Sherlock lives, and he doubts that the man is interested in seeing him again.

_I shouldn't have kissed him. Or, I should have done it differently. In a way that didn't spook him off._

Sherlock had kissed him back, most definitely—John hadn't dreamt that part. But then, he'd fucked it up with a few careless words. It hadn't taken much. Now, it's not even all that, sex and so on, that he finds himself missing the most.

 _Why do I miss him? We only knew each other for one weekend_.


	7. Core Collapse

"Hey Kerry," John greets one of the Institute's international postgrads in the café queue three months later.

"Hi John. Draft all done, then?"

John lifts his laptop partly out of his backpack and flashes a smile. "On my way to Professor Nikolaos to go through some practical stuff; if he's happy with my alterations, I think I can submit it this week."

"Good on you."

John fills a disposable cup with hot water from a tank. "So, have you heard who got the Duke of Colchester Grant?" It's the prestigious grant for an up-and-comer post-graduate astronomy student to establish their own research group. "Holmes got it, didn't he? Must have." John, too, had submitted an application but mostly just for laughs; he knows he would never get it.

"Haven't you heard? Holmes got the Colchester, but is _declining_ it. They're having another round of applications in the fall."

John does a double take. "What? Declined it?" It's the equivalent of winning the lottery and then burning the ticket. "Why would he decline?"

Kerry shrugs and grabs a pair of tongs to serve herself a flapjack. "There's different rumours, but mostly people are saying that he's leaving Cambridge."

"Leaving? To do what?"

"Nobody knows. Judging by the state of him, nothing science-related."

"What do you mean?"

"You haven't seen him around campus? Guy's like a total junkie," Kerry scoffs. "I guess he looked good enough on paper for the grant committee."

"So you know him? Where does he live?"

"No, I don't. I think Tris—that's Tristan Dodkins—is in the same research group but he's still got a desk at interferometry, you could ask him. I think they're both Trinity."

Worry is now twisting John's innards—one so intense that it surprises him. Why would Sherlock quit? Getting offered the grant means that he must have earned his PhD and submitted an outstanding plan for future research to the grant committee. _What the hell is going on? Why would he decline the grant and leave?_

John ends up drinking his tea standing up by the rubbish bins. Then, he jogs up the stairs to a corridor where the optical interferometry people have their offices. It takes a while to find Dodkins; John doesn't know what the man looks like so has to ask around.

Dodkins turns out to be a bespectacled, tweed-wearing younger version of a walking, talking Oxbridge stereotype. He pushes his glasses down on his nose and scrutinises John over the rims as though he's an owl perched on a branch above.

"I'm looking for Sherlock Holmes," John says.

"Why?" Dodkins asks. His tone has an irritating, lilting, superior note.

"I need a word with him," is what John settles on. At first he'd considered saying he's worried about the man but he doubts many of his fellow students share his sentiment.

Dodkins sits down behind his small, scratched desk. "I am not his keeper."

"Nobody said you were." John crosses his arms. "I just need to know where he lives."

"His rooms are at Blue Boar Court. Though I am not certain if he's still there. No one has seen him for weeks, I believe, though I spend so little time at Cavendish due to my allergies that I can't swear that information cannot have changed."

"Where in Blue Boar Court?" John knows the place; it's one of Trinity's postgrad accommodations. He'd once had to escape out the window when his date of one night and one night only had been ill-informed about the time her boyfriend would get home.

"There is a nameboard downstairs. I must say I find it highly irregular to be so interrogated about Holmes."

"Well, I'll leave you to your highly irregular day, then," John snaps and hurries outside to get his bike.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

 

John swings his legoff his bike just as he whizzes past Newton's Apple Tree, standing with only one foot on the pedal as he uses the last of his forward momentum to make a sharp turn from Trinity Street to Blue Boar Court. The cloister-like facade offers shelter from the rain that has been pelting Cambridge for a week, now, turning most footpaths to mud. He leaves his bike leaning against a heavy, square flowerpot in the inner courtyard.

It doesn't take long to find the glass-covered dormitory information board and sure enough: Holmes is listed in room number seven. John finds it next to a communal bathroom, but a knock on the door produces no results. Three large, black plastic bags, one suitcase and two cardboard boxes full of books sit beside the door against the wall as though someone is either moving in or out.

On top of the books sits Sherlock's laptop. Any passer-by could snatch it so Sherlock can't be far; such a meticulous person wouldn't leave it out in the damp weather, exposed to thieves. _He's probably in the loo_. _He can't have left, since all this stuff is still here,_ John thinks, relieved.

He sits down on the suitcase and waits.

And waits.

No sign of the occupant of the bedsit. John pokes around corners, asks people entering their own dorms whether they've seen Sherlock. Nobody has. John peers through the mail slot on the room door and sees a set of keys on the floor; he recognises the keyring as Sherlock's.

It doesn't make sense. Could he have left in such a huff that he'd have left so much stuff behind?

He doubts Sherlock would be at the Institute. If he's leaving and nobody has seen him in at least a week, where would he go?

John has one thought, one idea—it's a long shot, but it's all he's got.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-  
  


  
The bike ride down the A1303 away from the centre of the city is wet, windy and miserable. It's twilight by the time John gets to where a small path winds off towards the north, leading to the old, now mostly decommissioned Thorrowgood and Northumberland telescopes. A notice board in the small courtyard connecting them declares both closed, and the area looks empty and forlorn in the rain. John is wearing just a now-drenched sweater on top of a T-shirt, and he'd made the optimistic mistake of wearing shorts today; the weather hadn't looked all that bad that morning. Now, he's shivering, and his loafers are thoroughly muddy.

He goes to yank the front door of the small, black, angled building housing the Thorrowgood telescope. He feels stupid when he finds them locked. _That's what the damned sign said._

Just as he's about to walk away, he hears the sound of footsteps from inside. The space must have as handsome an echo as its neighbour, the larger building housing the Cambridge's second telescope.

John knocks on the door; there's no answer. He circles around the building and finds another entrance which looks like it may have been added later because of fire regulations. The door is ajar, and there's a hairpin on the muddy ground next to it. _Has someone picked the lock?_

He steps in. The place is not heated, but out of the wind and the downpour, he instantly feels warmer. "Hello?" he calls out.

Less than ten steps bring him from the back door to the middle of the telescope room. Nobody's using it; the roof hatch is closed. It's quite dark inside, but John can still spot someone sitting on a bench by a display of antique navigational equipment.

It's Sherlock, smoking a cigarette held in shaking fingers. He's pale and visibly thinner than he'd been just a few months ago. A long-sleeved black T-shirt has been paired with worn, slim-cut jeans. His hair looks like a far cry from the luscious, lovingly cared-for curls John had admired during their weekend at Mullard. He inhales hard from the cigarette, then scratches nervously at a spot on his left knee, obviously choosing to ignore John. He looks sweaty, and sniffs twice before his next drag of smoke.

John steps closer, and wonders if the dilated pupils he spots are from the low light or from something else.

"Hi," he says and sits down at the opposite end of the bench.

"I didn't know you had a habit of breaking and entering," Sherlock says dryly and sniffs again.

 _Could he have a cold?_ John wonders, then admits to himself that it's just wishful thinking. He's not a doctor, but he can spot the signs of certain bad habits. "Well, you did the groundwork. All I did was walk in."

"What do you want from me?" Sherlock asks and sounds as though he's not really interested in an answer. "Did someone send you to talk to me? In which care you're wasting your time. I'm leaving."

"Why?" John asks, planting his palms on his knees. "Why'd you turn down the grant?"

It's clear that Sherlock is in no state to work, let alone embark on a massive new scientific project. What isn't clear is how he ended up like this—why he chose to let go like that.

"I asked them," Sherlock says cryptically, "I asked if someone else could take over all those things I am not good at. They told me to ask myself how many intelligent people have passed through Cambridge through the years, and what connects those who actually left their mark on history. _Collaboration,_ they said. _Communication_. _No man of science is an island_ , said my supervisor; _not in the 21st century_. I was told in no certain terms to adopt leadership if I was to measure up to the standards expected from the recipient of the grant."

John is certain that a great many of history's greatest natural scientists weren't any kinds of HR wizards or great team players but there is one grain of truth in the words Sherlock has quoted: the world has changed, and the loner genius is becoming a myth. Everything is done in committees, groups, in collaboration, credit shared between all who have so much as corrected the placement of a comma in an article. That change may not be a good one, especially if it means wasting the talents of people such as Sherlock.

"I have seen plenty enough proof that any endeavour that entails having to deal with people is not for me." He is pointedly glaring at John. "They told me that if I didn't want to accept the grant, I could apply for the lower-tier spots. Become _an assistant_. No, thank you." He crushes the butt of his cigarette under the heel of his leather Oxford and lights another. The smell of the smoke is already quite intense in the smallish observatory.

"So you're going to do… what?"

"London. My brother's got something set up for me. Some consultant position for a company in the City."

 _In that state?_ "When did you last see your brother?"

Sherlock shrugs; more of a twitch, after which his shoulders hunch down again. "A year ago. Two years ago. Who cares."

"Well, you obviously don't." John leans his back against the rough wall planks. "So, you're just going to… use, then? Show up at that company, see how long until they kick you out when you show up too many times completely off your tits? Then, what?"

No answer.

"But… maybe you could give the grant a go?" John tries. "It's not that bad, working with people."

"You know it would be more than that."

"Anyone would be lucky to work with you," John tries feebly.

"Funnily enough, they never seem very aware of that," Sherlock quips bitterly. He straightens his back, lowers his hand holding the cigarette to lean against his knee. "What people want from me is to boost their careers, or _a bit of fun_ , as you would have probably phrased it. What I want from them is _nothing_."

A pang of guilt hits John in the solar plexus. _That night, it felt like you were tempted to want a little bit more than that._

"No," Sherlock says resolutely. "I should have made some deductions from the way it all went to shit at Mullard, so feel free to ignore that… _thing_ we did. My use is controlled, and it's none of your business, anyway," he warns.

John swallows. "Sherlock… You are the most interesting thing, the most interesting person that has happened to me in a long time. You're more than your research. Yes, you need the right team and yes, they should let you focus on the science and not the bureaucracy, but they're going to waste that brain of yours if they refuse to accommodate, and _you're_ going to waste it if you just give up without trying. This, you, right now, that can't be the end, it can't be the rest of your life, however long or short." John knows his last statement is conjecture, that it's grim beyond words, but this is not fucking _controlled use_.

"I don't need your pity, John. I'm not your project, and you don't have to make amends for acting like a moron around me once. I bet you had a nice laugh with your _mates_ afterwards, _having a go at that frigid freak Holmes_."

Anger fizzes into life in John. "You know fuck all about me! You never let me explain––what I meant with what I said was that I don't often do stuff with blokes, but you felt like someone I might cross that line with. You think you're the only one for whom that night would have been a big thing? I was drunk, fuck yes, but it doesn't change the fact that I quite liked you right from the start."

Sherlock exhales a cloud of smoke. "As I said, I don't need you to be nice to me. You know as little about my life as I do yours. I think it best we keep it that way."

John stands up, points an angry finger at him. "That's not true, and you know it. You don't let people get to know you, but you let me do that a little bit that weekend. You're not the person people talk about; you're not––– _this_!" he exclaims, gesticulating with his palm to demonstrate the sight of Sherlock. "I know what it feels like not to belong, to be the wrong sort. I was never the clever one, and suddenly I was the _older student_.Maybe it's not as bad as you have experienced, but you made _me_ feel good about myself, about my work, after you stopped dismissing it completely. You're funny especially when you don't try to be, you're your own person, and that's not something a lot of these bloody airheads and legacy kids and wannabe Einsteins without half a brain as yours all lack. A signature personality," John declares.

"I repel people."

"Because that's what you've decided to do. You're worth more than this, more than some shit job you'll hate because it has nothing to do with science—a job they won't actually give you because even an idiot could see you've got a problem and I wouldn't be surprised if that problem's got you injecting, now."

Instinctively, Sherlock palm glides up to briefly touch the crook of his opposite elbow before he catches himself. He looks away, past John, as though there's something in the opposite wall more worthy of his interested.

"Please, Sherlock; fight, instead of giving up like this."

"Why do you care so much? How does it benefit you?"

"Because that's what _people DO_!"

John's outburst makes Sherlock's eyes go wide.

"Have you got a place for tonight? You said you were going to London, so have you got a train ticket, bus ticket, anything?"

"My brother is sending a car tomorrow."

"And you returned your dorm keys."

"They demanded I do it today. Apparently, I should have done it two days ago."

John grabs his skinny arm and pulls him up. "Come on."

"What? Where?" Sherlock hastily snuffs out the cigarette butt he drops to the floor with his heel.

"You're coming back to mine. Bed's not big, but it should be big enough. You're not sleeping here, that's for sure."

  
  
-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

  
  
"So you were just going to…what?" John asks, watching Sherlock crunching his curls dry with one of John's towels. Not even two mugs of tea had made Sherlock stop shivering after sitting in the cold, damp observatory for hours, so John had offered him a bath and a set of dry clothes. The T-shirt is a bit big for his lithe frame, and the sweatpants a bit short, given their height difference. Without his bespoke suit bits, Sherlock looks… less intimidating.

Out of his long-sleeved shirt, the track marks on the crooks of Sherlock's elbows—one of them red and painful-looking—are clearly visible. John hadn't commented on them specifically, or on the fact that Sherlock seems a lot less nervous and twitchy than he had before retreating into the bathroom. John doubts it's just because of the hot water.

"So, tomorrow."

Sherlock shrugs, spreads the towel again and lets it hang from on top of his head so that John can't see his face.

"You can't just quit," John says incredulously. "What if Einstein had quit?"

"Einstein worked at the patent office. And, I'm not him."

John chuckles quietly; a modest man wouldn't feel the need to say so outright. "What if Newton had just eaten the apple?"

"What are you trying to argue with these inane analogies?" Sherlock throws the towel back to John. "I don't need your advice how to run my life."

"Says every junkie ever," John snaps, and Sherlock's jaw drops.

John expects him to leave, but instead he just stares, then withdraws a little into himself. "You won't see me again after tomorrow."

"That would be a shame."

"Why? Because we spent a weekend together? We're not _friends_ , John—I don't have 'friends'. I'm not your charity project."

"No, you're not," John confirms. "A friend isn't a synonym to a charity project. That grant being given to someone else… _that's_ charity.

"What have you got to lose? Except everything if you just leave? You think they're going to call you in ten years and beg you to come back because they've made a terrible mistake? No, Sherlock. Someone else will have taken your place."

"My place? _My place_? That never existed. But you can't see that, can you, because you're so… God, what it must be like in your funny little brain? Must be so boring."

"Why are you even arguing with me, then? Just do whatever it is you think you're going to do. In ten years, you're going to look back and hope they _would_ call you." _If you're still alive._

"Meanwhile, you will stay here and tell everyone how you tried to save––"

"Shut up!" John says. "Why the fuck is it so hard to just accept a bit of kindness? I don't know what made you hate people so much, and I don't doubt you had good reason to, but you don't know _shit_ about me."

"I know you're not a very polite host. This mug is chipped," Sherlock points out, peering into the one he had downed two portions of tea from.

John can't help bursting into laughter.

  
-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-  
  


  
John would be lying if he claimed it wasn't a little bit awkward, sharing a bed with someone he had once tried to snog in a way that ended badly. In bed, Sherlock is like a coatrack made of elbows, and he's so tall that he has to lie slightly diagonally in John's bed, which only leaves an uncomfortably narrow triangular bit of mattress for its owner. Sherlock had, at first, insisted that the floor was fine, and John had firmly told him off. Then John had said he'd be happy to put a blanket on the floor and sleep there while Sherlock got the bed, and Sherlock had told him off instead.

So, now they're lying in the dark, the warmth of another body so close by that it's both alarming and comforting—at least to John. He bites his tongue to avoid succumbing to the temptation of trying to lighten the mood by commenting something idiotic such as _'this is nice_ '.

Sherlock clearly isn't a fan of small talk. And, he seems to have been good at hiding some serious levels of exhaustion, since it only takes about ten minutes before his breathing changes to that of someone well on their way towards deeper sleep.

 

-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-  
  
  


When John stirs awake, he has no idea what the time is because he can't see a clock from the bed. It must be the early hours of the morning; dawn hasn't happened yet.

What has roused him is the mattress shifting under Sherlock as the man sits up and then crawls to the foot of the bed before doing a parkourish leap over the footboard, hand gripping the wood. He lands on the floor quietly, and John assumes him to make his way to the loo. Instead, Sherlock goes to his clothes which have been folded and placed on a chair to rummage around a trouser pocket. Whatever he has fished out he then takes to the coffee table by the small sofa next to the window.

Taking care to be quiet, John shifts a little so he can see better without Sherlock realising he's awake.

Sherlock fetches half a glass of water and sits on the sofa. He is holding a spoon with half of the handle removed which he had produced from his belongings. He also has what looks like one of those orange-capped insulin needles, a bag of powder which to John looks familiar, and a cigarette filter he presses flat between two fingers. A bit of water goes on the spoon, then what looks like a carefully measured amount of the powder from a small plastic bag, stirred with the orange cap. The filter is dropped in and once it's soaked, Sherlock draws a third of the syringe full through it. He turns the syringe so that the needle points skywards, taps it with quick, rehearsed movements, airs it and then replaces the cap.

John thinks he should interfere, but then what? Embarrassed and possibly angry, Sherlock would surely leave. It's still raining outside, and his clothes have to still be at least damp. Until he gets to whatever kind of place his brother has waiting for him, he doesn't have anywhere to go. If he had money, wouldn't he have declined John's offer of a place to stay tonight and gone to a hotel?

No, John rather suspects that the money he'd had has gone to what is now inside that syringe.

Instead of going back to his clothes and getting his own, Sherlock grabs John's old belt from where it has been left hanging from a bookshelf. With practiced movements, he tourniquets his arm with it, pulling the leather taut with his teeth and then locking the loose end between his arm and his torso. He removes the orange cap with his teeth and then, without cleaning the skin, wastes no time in finding a vein, pushing the needle in, aspirating a little to ensure he's not punctured through the blood vessel and injecting his poison of choice.

It seems to take less than thirty seconds before his eyes drift closed, the shape of him in the moonlight from the window relaxes, and he leans against the backrest of the sofa. The tourniquet is allowed to slide down his arm, the needle removed. He presses nothing but his finger into the crook of his arm, encloses them in as he bends his elbow. Instead of coming back to bed, he lies down on the short sofa, long legs dangling off one armrest.

John turns to face the wall and lies awake silently, trying to make sense the strange life form in his flat. It's obvious that Sherlock isn't going to stay and fight for his career just because John tells him he should, but maybe he'll remember John's words at some point and question whether shooting up in the loo of some company full of people who don't understand anything about astronomy is the life he wants. John just can't imagine him sitting on the tube in the afternoon, commuting home to some bedsit. No, he belongs at Cambridge, pacing corridors and scribbling endless notes filled with equations on whiteboards, allowing his mind to be the supercomputer it is, instead of demoting it to a punch card.

John has a nagging feeling the universe is expecting him to do something, but what? Tell Sherlock to hold himself to a higher standard?

He feels helpless. What Sherlock is doing has once been a choice, and now is a curse and an illness. He needs to be the one to want to quit, isn't that what they say? John isn't really his friend, or a partner, let alone his guardian.

 _Please stay_ , John thinks. _I don't want to find out ten years from now at some reunion that your name's on a gravestone_.

  
  
-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

  
  
When John wakes up in the morning, it is in an empty bed in an empty flat. Both their mugs from last night have been washed and placed atop a tea towel spread on the counter. The word _'thanks_ ' has been written _on_ the bloody towel with a permanent marker.


	8. The Expanding Cosmos

It's October, and autumn has draped Cambridge in hues of red, orange and brown. John loves biking over the bridges of the River Cam at this time of the year; the warm hues of the red brick buildings alongside the waterway perfectly match the warm colours of the season.

Michaelmas term has started, and John has been assigned to act as what is officially titled an "Unestablished University Lecturer", which in reality is part-time teaching for a few 1st year physics classes. Unestablished is right; it's a consolation prize. While he now has his PhD, receiving that title had meant the end of his project. There is no funding, no research post for him at the astrophysics group, and no tenure-track teaching post, even if he'd wanted it, which he doesn't. When the term ends, he may well find himself unemployed, and John doesn't know whether that will be a good thing or a bad thing. He should be filling out applications to securing further research funding, surveying possibilities of applying for post-doc positions at other universities. It's just that he doesn't want to leave Cambridge. It's as much a home as any place has ever been, and he's spent his best years there. Yet, it seems like the place is actively trying to push him out. He's barely even on the outer orbit of the teaching staff since he's on an hourly contract. He had to give up his subsidised grad student flat, and go further out, to a squalid bedsit. He has no reason to go to the astrophysics department anymore since the lectures are held at different building, and he feels like a fish out of water at the local pubs and student parties. He's effectively an outsider, even though he knows all there is to know about what it's like to be a part of this university. He's outgrown it and his so-called research career like a pair of comfortable trousers he keeps patching up though he knows in his heart that they should be discarded for good.

Every time he takes his bike out of town for some exercise and looks at its spires from a distance, it feels like he's saying goodbye.

He keeps to himself.

  
-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-  
  


  
Come the end of the term, John decides not to accept the offer for more teaching hours in the next one. Students like him enough, but teaching the basics of thermodynamics and optics is not what he means to do for the rest of his life.

So, he's been looking at projects abroad. There's one making use of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and they need a research assistant on site for a few months. It's run by the University of Central Florida. Getting a work permit for the US would be a nightmare, but it turns out Puerto Rico isn't much of a bureaucratic nightmare at all. He'd even be allowed to use some of the allocated radio telescope hours for his own research. He's always wanted to go there, even if just to pay homage to the fact that Arecibo has been used extensively in the SETI project. He could continue developing further his method of detecting radio signals traveling between interstellar objects; he has some ideas he's been toying with connected to dark matter. Arecibo would be perfect for that. It's not Cambridge when it comes to social life—being in the middle of the jungle—but as radio-astronomy observatories go, it's the Holy Land. The main collecting dish is over three hundred metres wide, constructed into a karst sinkhole. It has four radar transmitters, and as a spherical rather than a parabolical reflector, it doesn't suffer from the astigmatism which could cause a significant margin of error for John's potential experiments. He knows Cambridge has been trying to open up negotiations to use the facility. Maybe having been there could open future doors for him to return to his Alma Mater?

Most of all he just wants to stop feeling so stagnant.

  
  
**— Three months later —**  
**—Arecibo, Las Marías, Puerto Rico—**

  
Everyone still tries to speak Spanish to John, even though he's been here for two months. When the landline in the control room rings, he has trouble getting a word in so that he could ask the receptionist at the Visitor's Centre to slow down and to change to English.

"Inglés, por favor," John tries; "Please!"

"We close, but visitor here ask for you."

"I don't give tours," John replies. It's not the first time someone from Cambridge has popped in; many astrophysics students and radio-astronomers visit Puerto Rico for the cheap and cheerful beach life and a pilgrimage to one of the world's greatest research units in their field.

"He ask for you, Señor John."

"Christ." He'd just been about to walk back to his room on the other side of the compound before it got dark; the area is rife with large spiders, mosquitoes the size of dragonflies and other critters which come out after dark, and John prefers to have closed his room door behind himself by then. The lamp in the shower room is broken so he would have preferred to sort that business out before dark, too. The visitor must be some idiot who has hopped on the last bus up here without knowing it was the last bus, and after seeing a vaguely British-sounding name in the staff roster board at the visitor's centre, is now looking for help. "I'm coming."

"I need lock up," Josette, the visitor centre receptionist tells him. "I get him to wait by main entrance."

"Thanks." John grabs a tissue from above the sink in the corner of the control room and dabs his sweaty forehead.

  
  
-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-0-o-

  
  
Night falls suddenly in the tropics; twilight lasts all of about the ten minutes it takes him to make his way to the entrance. Cicadas are in full swing under the amazingly star-sprinkled night sky. Here, up on the mountain far from big cities, light pollution doesn't hide dimmer stellar bodies from view. The Milky Way is a particularly impressive sight, one John never gets tired of.

Hands in his pockets, glad for the slight breeze that is making the tropical heat more bearable, John walks to the floodlight front of the white, angular Angel Ramos Visitor's Centre. All the tour buses have left, and nothing but darkness can be seen through the glass doors. It's a little eerie being here after dark.  John stops next to a guard rail separating the narrow, tiled entrance area from a hair-raising drop down the tree-covered mountainside.

After a minute, he hears footsteps. Tentative, at first, then more determined.

"You're a hard man to find, John Watson."

It's not a baritone anyone could easily forget.

John pivots on his heels, and Sherlock walks in from behind the corner of the planetarium wing. He's wearing a cream linen suit and a white Panama hat.

John feels terribly underdressed in his faded NASA T-shirt and old shorts.

"I never assumed anyone would need to look for me."

They shake hands—a gesture which strikes John as odd. Then again, a hug is not very…it wouldn't be very Sherlock, would it? A kiss would be presumptuous, seeing as their prior attempt turned out to be an aborted mission, a rocket tearing itself apart on the launch pad.

"You look…good", John offers. Sherlock is now standing close enough to a lamp illuminating a sign, and John can take in the full, glorious view. Sherlock is as pale as ever, but his cheeks have filled out just a little compared to the state John had seen him in last. His clothes are perfectly tailored, there's a healthy rosy complexion and a calm, relaxed stance. No signs of him being under the influence of anything illegal as far as John can tell. He doesn't look like anyone with a hard drug habit but then again, people are good at subterfuge. Sherlock's smile seems to be easily triggered, and there are no dark shadows under his eyes. He looks… happy?

"Four months in residential rehab in Austria not gone to waste, then."

John blinks. "You…did? What happened to going to London?"

"My brother is cleverer than I perhaps give him credit for. He gave me two options: fend for myself, or head for a big brother-funded retreat in the Alps. He said I was not to set foot at the company he had negotiated as my internship post; I'd ruin his reputation. At first, I considered picking option A, but something someone—perhaps not a friend, but still—had once said to me about not wasting things made me change my mind."

John leans on the safety railing and Sherlock joins him. They watch moths dancing in the nearest floodlight on the ground.

"So, what are you doing now? Here, I mean?"

Sherlock looks into the dark horizon, eyes narrowed. "You could say I am representing the Duke of Colchester. There is a certain grant that must be discussed."

"You gave that up, didn't you?" John is thoroughly confused.

"As it turns out, turning down a grant one has actually been awarded required additional paperwork. This never occurred to me, so that paperwork was never filled out. When I left Cambridge, they assumed I was on the hunt for the team members. Eventually, my brother told me I had to tell them the truth. I got the board to agree to a three-month medical leave of absence.  I'm sorted now, and the Board reminded me that I had to submit a progress plan at the end of March, by which time I am supposed to have identified the team structure. So here I am."

"So? I mean, if it's still in play, that's fantastic news. I'm glad you've decided to use it, after all, but what the hell are you doing here?"

"I'm going to give the project leadership role to you."

John's eyes go wide. "What? No! Why would you? It's yours, surely you should continue your––"

Sherlock raises his hand to quiet him. "I _will_ continue my project, and you will be instrumental in ensuring I get to do it in a manner that allows me to focus on the science, not leading the work of others. _You_ will be the head of the group. I went to Cambridge, asked around. Read your thesis. Spoke to some of the teaching staff who were disappointed by your decision not to teach There is tremendous potential for synergy between our approaches, as long as you give your little green men the final boot."

John worries his lip. He feels surreal, standing here watching Venus near the horizon and discussing founding his own bloody research group. At Cambridge. With _Sherlock_.

"We don't know each other. It was just that one weekend," John says incredulously.

Sherlock shrugs. "Enough to prove that we can enjoy each other's company, your social skills will ensure a functioning work environment for others, that your intellect is sufficient for collaboration, and that we are quite attracted to each other. The latter is a bonus, not a requirement, of course, and if you don't wish to explore that avenue further, this will be the last word on the subject."

That's quite a lot to take in, so John says the only marginally sensible thing that comes to mind: "Do you want to see the telescope?"

"The visitor centre was rather plebeian. I would very much enjoy a tour by an expert," Sherlock comments, voice low close to John's ear.

John leads him to a back gate which connects to the main walkway to the array. It's lit, but the area behind the telescope close to the edge of the mountainside has a bench and some tarps—staff often go there to stargaze— and no lighting. It will be suitably private, save for all the bloody spiders.

Sherlock is wearing his signature leather oxfords, and his fine suit isn't a very good fit for traipsing around the gravel paths and undergrowth, but he doesn't seem to mind. John leads him to rim of the massive, grey bowl of the telescope, then around it to the opposite side. A narrow path leads up a ridge where the best views of the surrounding countryside and the sky are. At one point it's impossible to see the next steps in the dark, so John goes first and then offers Sherlock his hand. Once they're both up on the narrow ridge, John is tempted to hang onto that hand.

Sherlock swallows, takes a step back and lets go of his hand. "That night, John, I–– What you said made me assume you were trying to explain it to yourself why you shouldn't go through with it. Us. I've been pushed away by enough people not to willingly subject myself to that again."

"You never let me explain. What I was trying to explain and making a crap job of was that I don't do that, not with blokes, but you were the first one I _would_ have wanted to be with like that."

"Just sex?"

"No. Well, we never got far enough to find out." Truth be told, if a relationship had been in the cards in any way back then, he would have hesitated. Now, having gained some perspective after separating himself from the tight-knit community at Cambridge, he couldn't give a toss. If there was someone he wanted, someone who shared his love for certain things, someone he was attracted to.

_Fuck. Why am I speaking in hypotheticals?_

"I didn't want to _want_ to use," Sherlock muses, clasping his hands behind his back and turning to face the open vista before them. "I thought of what you said, that it was double standards. That I shouldn't need it. That I _could_ not need it. Why? Why would you make such a judgment? What the hell did you even think you knew about me?"

"Bold words from someone who had taken one look at me and thought they had me all worked out. 'You were in the military' and so on. What I knew about _you_ was that you were about to front your own research group and get famous, while I'd have been lucky to be hired as janitor somewhere. Sometimes, out here, that's exactly what I feel like my job description is."

"You were…jealous of me?"

"Why wouldn't I be? Professionally, you have everything. I don't."

"That's absolute nonsense. _You_ have everything, especially the things I couldn't achieve, no matter how hard I worked. You get along with people. They _like_ you; they want to work with you. I am finding the pressure to lead a group…daunting, hence my offer. I don't _want_ to deal with them, I don't know how. I only know how to deal with you," he adds miserably.

"You wish," John teases him. "I might have friends, but I don't have them in high places. Over Glendale's dead body would they not give you everything you need and want if you agree to take the grant."

"Maybe they don't know what I want," Sherlock says quietly.

"Do _you_ know?" John asks.

"That weekend was… John, I––" Sherlock trails out, mouth left open as he is visibly struggling for words. Then, he seems to gather some courage, and out comes a verbal barrage. "At first I thought you were teasing me, but the more we talked, the more I understood how you thought, the more I–– You're looking for signs of life, viable life, on other worlds, whereas the life on _this_ planet has, for me, always been alien enough that I never belonged, was never accepted, was always stepped around. Maybe, for a second, when we were together, I hoped that accidentally, while searching for something else, you had found…me. You weren't looking for me, and I don't even know if you like me, but Ifelt… _found._ "

He turns to look at John, his eyes reflecting the lights of the telescope. This isn't the aloof, snooty, cold, mean person John had been peripherally aware of before their weekend. This is the person John had caught glimpses of during those two days—someone who has the same sorts of hopes and dreams and feelings as everyone else but doesn't quite like to accept that.

"You think I go around kissing random people just for the heck of it? ' _If I like you_ '—for fuck's sake, Sherlock, make a deduction based on the data to hand! I didn't know, I still don't know if you…well, do anything with other people, and I didn't want to make you uncomfortable."

"I'm always uncomfortable around other people. But maybe not…at least not all the time…with you. So once I got my… _habits_ under control, I started thinking about the project. And I suddenly realised that planning who I recruit to this group I am supposed to interact with, I cannot imagine it existing without, well, _you_. You like people, you get along with them, and we have proven to be able to work together. If we could start this together, each do what we do best and be able to delegate the challenging things to the other… This would be whatever we make of it."

"So I'd leech off your fame and fortune while handling budgets and HR?" John teases him.

"No. You would co-chair a varied, multidisciplinary research team open to new ideas—yes, sometimes even _stupid_ ones such as if you decided to start talking some SETI nonsense—and we would have equal say in what gets pushed forward and what doesn't."

Equality and sharing doesn't sound like Sherlock Holmes, at least not according to everything John had heard of him before really getting to know him. "I'm nothing special, Sherlock."

"You may not reach your potential on your own, that much is true, but having to face the reality of what is expected of me in my post-doc phase, I have come to realise that neither will I. Conductor of light, John."

"What?"

"Conductor of light. That is what I remember calling you. Some people may not have the most luminous intellect—that's you, by the way—or all the requisite skills to lead—hello, that's me—but in congruence with the right person, it would be different for both of us. It would be more than the sum of its parts. If we do this, if we collaborate, it will take both of us in directions we may not even be able to anticipate. Maybe I hoped that, well, some of those directions might involve what we never really––"

"Shut up," John says, having got the message. He takes Sherlock's hand and pulls him closer, rises on tiptoes to go for the kiss they have been circling like a satellite on a low orbit.

Coming up for air a moment later, Sherlock asks, "Is that a yes? You're not tired of Cambridge or radio astronomy? Want to see some more?"

"God, yes."

John pulls Sherlock closer again so that he can resume the kiss.

 

## —The End—

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I am eternally grateful to all my betas and enthusiastic readers. There has been much cosmic love for these astronerds.
> 
> I will return on the 1st of April with _**You Go To My Head: Family Medicine**_.


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